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- Nilsson, Magnus
(author)
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Den moderne Ivar Lo-Johansson: Modernisering, modernitet och modernism i statarromanerna
- 2003
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation examines the modernity of the Swedish proletarian author Ivar Lo-Johansson (1901-1990), as manifested in the so-called 'statare' novels: Godnatt, jord (Breaking Free, 1933), Bara en mor (Only a Mother, 1939), and Traktorn (1943). The dissertation examines, on the one hand, modernisation and modernity as the topoi of these novels, and on the other, how the author relates to the literary tendency that has come to signify the aesthetic modernisation of the 20th century, i.e. modernism. The theoretical basis of the dissertation is Marxist. The primary source of inspiration has been the model for a Marxist hermeneutics presented by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, comprising three levels of textual interpretation: the text is read, first, as an historical allegory, and second, as a statement within a class-related discourse, and, finally, in relation to the transformation of the modes of production. The accounts in the novels of modernisation and modernity are first close read and then studied in a historical context. Then the aesthetics of the novels are related to modernism. The account of modernisation and modernity in the novels is found to be fundamentally embracing, even if the negative or threatening aspects of modern society are never downplayed by the author. This position is founded in Lo-Johansson’s socialist outlook, according to which the labour movement guarantees the fulfilment of modernity’s utopian promises and avoidance of its dangers. This view is expressed by Lo-Johansson in a critical dialogue with other contemporary accounts, literary and non-literary, of modernity and modernisation. This dialogue is examined historically with the aid of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, as interpreted by Raymond Williams and other Marxist critics. First, Lo-Johansson's relationship to other literary responses to modernity and modernisation – mainly primitivism and socialist realism – is examined. Then, the 'statare' novels are related to non-literary modernist discourses, such as the ideology of the social democratic welfare state and the ideas about the new woman and the new youth. The description of the relation between the aesthetics in the 'statare' novels and modernism is focussed on the term 'social modernism'. This term was coined by Michael Denning and it signifies an attempt to redirect modernist aesthetics away from the abandonment of political, avant-garde ideals as well as the celebration of artistic autonomy, by establishing contacts with extra-literary movements who aim for a change of society. Avant-gardist and social modernist ideas were propagated in Sweden in the interwar period by socialist critics such as Ture Nerman and Arnold Ljungdal. That Lo-Johansson embraces similar ideals is showed in an analysis of three constitutive components of the aesthetics of the 'statare' novels: polyphony, facticity, and the grotesque. These stylistic traits are placed within a modernist context through comparison to the social modernist American documentarism of the 1930s , as well as to different examples of experimental modernism, such as the American non-fiction novel and the nouveau roman.
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Från bruket till Yarden : nordiska perspektiv på arbetarlitteratur
- 2014
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Editorial collection (other academic/artistic)abstract
- I denna antologi uppmärksammas såväl äldre som nyare arbetarlitteratur från flera av de nordiska länderna. Dessutom anläggs en rad olika teoretiska och metodologiska perspektiv på arbetarlitteraturen. Snarare än att ge en samlad bild av den nordiska arbetarlitteraturen försöker antologin alltså visa upp denna litteraturs många fasetter och den mångfald som präglar forskningen om den.
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- Nilsson, Magnus, 1975-
(author)
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Efterord
- 2022
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In: Fortellinger om migrasjon. - Oslo : Universitetsforlaget. - 9788215065519 - 9788215065526
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Efterord till antologin "Fortellinger om migrasjon: Skandinavisk, fransk-, tysk- og spanskspråklig samtidslitteratur"
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- Hellberg, Therese, 1981-
(author)
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Vanära, fattigdom och dubbelarbete : om kvinnors platser och värden i folkhemmet i romaner och krönikor 1940–1955
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- My doctoral project aims to provide new knowledge about Swedish women’s writing between 1940 and 1955. I ask questions about how novels, short stories and chronicles depict women’s citizenship and produce ideas about the Swedish national community. I also ask questions about what conditions are required for women to be writers and in what ways a selection of texts written by working-class and middle-class women can contribute to new perspectives on the history of Swedish literature.With an understanding that the mass media plays a major role in the production of the imagined Swedish community, I study the production of women’s literature in relation to the dominant culture and the public (literary) sphere. By reading the texts both as mass media and as literature, I analyse the ways in which the texts (re)produce and negotiate the dominant national culture, and I highlight tensions and conflicts in and between the texts. Furthermore, I deploy a critical perspective when discussing the (re)production of myths about Sweden and citizen ideals. Another core point of departure is my understanding of how history is made and how the meanings of time and space are created through the selection, interpretation and valuation of texts. Additionally, the dominant culture becomes visible when marginalized texts, such as those written by female writers from 1940 to 1955, are read and the voices of these writers are heard.Various notions of Swedish women and their citizenship are produced in my selection of texts found in the archives. Overall, these texts challenge the myth of the Swedish welfare society, where all citizens can live without discrimination and poverty. Women’s citizenship is portrayed as circumvented, and brutal insights are provided into what a limited right to abortion and limited rape legislation mean for women, as well as what a society planned from a gender-complementary viewpoint means for women’s social and economic rights. The texts make visible both the patriarchy and the class society’s naturalised defence of inequality. They show that the struggle for (more) equal citizenship requires that it be waged against discrimination and against unequal material conditions.Furthermore, the texts also tell us that the myth of the Swedish community as homogenous, requires that conflicting narratives – like women’s novels and chronicles – be sorted out of the historiography.
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| 9. |
- Nilsson, Magnus
(author)
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En ny generation – en förnyad tradition? Klasspolitiska strategier i samtida svenskspråkig arbetarlitteratur
- 2014
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In: Samlaren. - Uppsala : Svenska Litteratursällskapet. - 0348-6133 .- 2002-3871. ; 135, s. 100-128
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Magnus Nilsson, School of Arts and Communication, Malmö UniversityA New Generation – An Innovated Tradition? Strategies of Class Politics in Contemporary Swedish-Language Working-Class Literature (En ny generation – en förnyad tradition? Klasspolitiska strategier i samtida svenskspråkig arbetarlitteratur)The aim of this article is to analyze how the emergence in recent years of a new generation of working-class writers has contributed to the development of the tradition of Swedish working-class literature. First, I investigate these writers’ representations of class and class injustice. Thereafter, I discuss how the attempts by contemporary working-class writers to innovate the tradition of working-class literature, by breaking with the realism usually considered to be its aesthetic backbone, have made it possible to use this tradition as a platform for literary critique of class injustice.
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| 10. |
- Nilsson, Magnus, 1975-
(author)
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Från statarnas ombudsman till turist i prekariatet? Om arbetarlitterära representationsmodeller
- 2023
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In: Samlaren. - Uppsala : Svenska Litteratursällskapet. - 0348-6133 .- 2002-3871. ; 144, s. 58-80
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Magnus Nilsson, School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University. From the Farm Labourers’ Ombudsman to Tourist in the Precariat (“Från statarnas ombudsman till turist i prekariatet? Om arbetarlitterära representationsmodeller”) The purpose of this article is to problematize working-class literature’s biographical representation model, that is, the widespread thought model according to which the political potential of working-class literature is dependent on the authors having a strong biographical connection to the working-class collectives they portray. This problematization, which takes its point of departure in an analysis of the reception of two literary works about the so-called pre-cariat—Anders Teglund’s Cykelbudet [The Bicycle Courier] (2021) and Kristian Lundberg’s Yarden [The Yard] (2009)—is both theoretical and historical. Drawing on the Marxist distinction between class in itself and class for itself, the article argues that the so-called precariat has not developed any common way of life or class conciousness that the authors could share. This is thematized in several contemporary literary depictions of precarious working conditions, which can therefore be read as an implicit criticism of working-class literature’s biographical representation model. The article also demonstrates that this model rests on a false picture of the tradition of working-class literature. Older working-class writers have not always had such a strong biographical anchorage in working-class life worlds as critics and literary researchers usually assume (and as the writers themselves have sometimes claimed). On the other hand, they have often, through their participation in the labor movement and its literary life, had an ideological/political connection to this class. Many of the contemporary authors who depict the so-called precariat also have political connections to the collectives they write about, in the form of involvement in organizations that fight against precarious working conditions. Therefore, the article argues that it can be fruitful to focus more on the ideological partisanship of writers portraying workers than on their biographical anchoring in the life worlds of these collectives.
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