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- Berglund, Karl, FD, 1983-
(author)
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Czy detektywi zabijają rynek literacki? : Boom szwedzkiej powieści kryminalnej w ujęciu statystycznym
- 2017
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In: Ambicje literatury popularnej. - Gdansk : Instytut Skandynawistyki, Universytetu Gdańskiego. - 9788378656074 ; , s. 11-28
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Crime novels from Scandinavia are commercial successes all over the world. In Sweden, the dominance of the crime genre on the book market is even more significant. According to Swedish book trade magazine Svensk Bokhandel, twelve of the top twenty books in the bestseller charts of fiction in 2010, were domestic crime novels. This has started intensive debates, where crime novels are blamed for out-competing other genres. Domestic crime fiction has had a commanding position of the commercial side of Swedish publishing business in the 2000s, but this has not always been the case. When did this literary genre-takeover take place? How did it take place? How can it be explained? Even though some research concerning Scandinavian crime fiction has been carried out over the last couple of years, no one has mapped the book market phenomenon as such. This article aims to fill this gap by offering a neutral and extensive description on the role and position of crime fiction in Swedish publishing between 1977 and 2010.
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- Berglund, Karl, FD, 1983-
(author)
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Död och dagishämtningar : en kvantitativ analys av det tidiga 2000-talets svenska kriminallitteratur
- 2017
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Book (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study investigates contemporary Swedish crime fiction through a quantitative content analysis of 116 Swedish crime fiction novels published 1998–2015 and written by the most successful authors in the genre. The study discusses killers, murder motives, victims, murder methods, and detectives and other protagonists, with the aim of identifying social patterns and recurring themes.In general, these novels are dominated by female protagonists and put much emphasis on portrayals of the main characters in their struggle to combine work and family life. This simultaneous shift to a female perspective and a focus on everyday life stands out in comparisons to earlier Swedish crime fiction. The novels are furthermore permeated by a partial realism, where depictions of everyday life, settings and contemporary details are realistic and concrete, while depictions of killers, murder motives, murder methods and victims most often are imaginative, spectacular and sensational, and thus in most cases show few similarities with actual crimes in contemporary Sweden. Also, the selection is characterised by a dominance of normality, where main characters and innocent victims affirm “normality” (they are most often middle class, white, heterosexual Swedes without immigrant background), whereas killers and unsympathetic victims are depicted as deviants in stark contrast to normality.The content often seems to be chosen by how well it works in relation to plot lines and genre requirements. Therefore, it is argued that both contextualising and functionalistic perspectives need to be taken into account when analysing depictions of society in contemporary crime fiction. With such a dual-vision approach, the ostensible realistic social criticism in the genre to a high extent appears to be a story about the genre.
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- Berglund, Karl, FD, 1983-
(author)
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Killer Plotting : Typologisk intriganalys utifrån fjärrläsningar av samtida svenska kriminalromaner
- 2017
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In: Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap. - 1104-0556 .- 2001-094X. ; :3-4, s. 41-68
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article updates and extends Tzvetan Todorov’s classical typology of crime fiction from 1971 – where he separates plots driven by curiosity from plots driven by suspense – through a distant reading of 113 commercially successful novels of Swedish crime fiction from the early 2000s. Furthermore, it aims to initiate a methodical discussion in literary studies concerning the benefits of using semi-big materials (instead of either very big or very small ones), and in combining computer-aided and traditional methods. The method used – killer plotting – is a word frequency count of all the times the murderer in each novel is mentioned in the plot related to the point in the plotline where the killer is revealed to the reader (and the protagonists). These rather simple measures manage to capture the basic structures of crime novels: clues, encounters with the hidden murderer, revealing, dramatic finale. The results show that a vast majority of the novels in the selection can be classified into one of six different plot types of crime fiction depending on how the killer appears: 1) the all-novel present murderer; 2) the seemingly insignificant murderer; 3) the suspected murderer; 4) the out-of-the-blue murderer; 5) the second murderer twist; and 6) the non-hidden murderer. All six types lie in the range between the two poles presented by Todorov, which demonstrates that contemporary Swedish crime fiction is dominated by recurring narrative structures that in various ways combine suspense and curiosity.
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