Samtida mottagande och sentida litteraturhistorieskrivning - Amalia Fahlstedt, en 1880-talsförfattarinna

Abstract

Amalia Fahlstedt (1853 – 1923) was a Swedish author of the 1880s. Her debut I flygten: berättelser (1882) contains a couple of short stories and a realistic approach, a common feature of the time. Her main theme was gender relations. During the years of her writing she includes more humour and psychological elements. Beside novels and short stories, she wrote dramas and poetry. At the beginning of the twentieth century she translated several books especially from Norwegian. The last known work, apart articles in journals, was Småbarnens sagbok: korta sagor för små barn (1920). Like many female writers at the time, she engaged in children issues and writing for children. Therefore only a few of the female writers of the 1880s authors reached a position in the national canon of Swedish literature. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the reception of Amalia Fahlstedt in the late nineteenth century and by which criteria she has been excluded from the national canon of Swedish literature The foundation for the essay is the private access to a comprehensive material written by, to and about Fahlstedt in the form of letters, original manuscripts and critiques between the years 1883 and 1923. Thus, the thesis has a descriptive and analytical approach in which different types of contemporary documents and are examined. Close reading of primary and secondary critical texts forms the basis for the image drawn from the reception of the authorship and the subsequent history of literature writing. The concepts of canonization, literary norm and socio-cultural capital are used in the analysis. The concept of gender is also central in the discussion of why female literature tends to become invisible in the writing of literary history.