Karin Nykvist, Litterature, Lund University

Becoming children: Constructions of childhood in Swedish literature 1800-2000

2005-2012

The aim of this project has been to examine and discuss how the child and childhood has been described, depicted and discussed in Swedish literature at various times since Romanticism. I have combined a historical and theoretical approach with close studies of key literary renderings of childhood from different fields and time periods. Since one of the theoretical stances of the project is that all literary depictions of children and childhood are constructions based on literary convention, I have treated fictional texts and texts with autobiographical claims in a smiliar manner. My main material consists of literary texts intended for an adult audience, but the questions that I pose in my project have opened up for a fruitful combination of children's and adult literature. My questions have been of a narratological as well as historical nature: how is the inner life of the child written and configured at different times in later Swedish literary history, and how is this rendering of the child related to the conception of childhood as a special part of life at the time of writing? Ultimately, the project is based on the idea that the literary child in a poignant way defines and formulates the adult ideas, dreams, fantasies and conceptions of childhood rather than says anything true and genuine about what it is to be a child. My theory is that this also applies to accounts with very high mimetic claims. The concept of childhood can usefully be regarded as the other of adulthood, the object against which the adult subject - the author as well as the reader -unconsciously is defined. In my research I have, therefore, examined why the child is given a place in the story, what role the child plays in the text, and the symbolical and metaphorical implications of the fictional, literary child. Strikingly often, renderings of children and of childhood are used not to say anything genuine about children or childhood per se, but as a mirror of or a contrast to the adult world.

During the course of my research, it proved necessary and useful to incorporate the ongoing, very dynamic, theoretical discussion on memory and autobiography in my work. This has been combined with my main theoretical supposition: that texts on children and childhood rest upon life-strong cultural and narratological formulas and patterns. The grand récit of childhood and the place of childhood within the grown person is viable and all-encompassing. On a few occasions, I have chosen to adopt a comparative approach and studied childhood narratives from different countries, written in different languages. This method has proven to have good potential and I look forward to developing it in the years to come. This part of my work has also enabled me to establish a strong network of researchers from several disciplines - historians, literary scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, film scholars and political scientists -particularly in the UK, Canada and USA, but also in Germany, Israel, Romania and Australia, which in turn also has enabled me to develop as a scholar and to publish internationally. Problems that I would like to probe further into entails questions on to what degree the story of childhood and the idea of children in literature is universal and transboundary. Here I see possibilities in making use of the theoretical advancements on World Literature. The literary material of my study has to a large degree been of high-brow-character, and I see vast possibilities in expanding my work to also entail popular genre literature, advertisement and other cultural expressions in which the mainstream cultural paradigm seldom is questioned but on the contrary often is underscored.

My main goal as far as publication goes has been to compile my findings in a book. The final work on this will be finished within the year. The book, Dreaming of Childhood, consists of ten chapters. It is opened by a theoretical and historical discussion where I present the historical background and discuss my main theoretical points and hypotheses. This is followed by a chapter which studies poetry and memoirs written during Swedish Romanticism which thematize childhood, or rather, as it turns out, childhood lost. Interesting writers in this respect are Erik Johan Stagnelius, Erik Gustaf Geijer and Samuel Hedborn. In the third chapter, I discuss the great childhood narratives of the turn of the 20th century - August Strindbergs's, Selma Lagerlöf's and Hjalmar Söderberg's - and study how they relate to the ideas about childhood prevalent at the time of their writing. The childhood narratives of the autodidact generation of writers are also given a chapter, and I have chosen to focus my presentation oon the children projected in the works of Moa and Harry Martinson, respectively. I compare those to the childhood narratives of Bertil Malmberg and discuss how and why the child's perspective is portrayed differntly in their works. In the fifth chapter I discuss the rendering of childhood within the context of the second world war, focusing mainly on texts by Cordelia Edvardson and Marit Paulsen. In the sixth chapter I discuss the motif of the autonomous child in Swedish literature, with an emphasis on the often politically coloured depictions of children of the 1960's and 1970's. Barbro Lindgren and PC Jersild are the main authors studied in the chapter, but it also discusses the children's characters of Astrid Lindgren as an important prerequisite. Then follows a discussion of Jan Myrdal's and Ingmar Bergman's influential autobiographical narratives, based on a discussion of the role played by memory in the childhood narrative. The dark childhood narratives of the 1980's get their own chapter, where the writings of Mare Kandre and Magnus Dahlström are addressed and studied in the light of the debate on the supposedly endangered childhood and the end of childhood that was lively at the time. The ninth chapter discusses the importance of nostalgia in childhood narratives, and addressess the image of the 50's and 60's childhood as a theme and prototype in childhood fiction aimed at adult as well as children readers, with Reidar Jönsson and Ann-Charlotte Alverfors as main examples. In this chapter I also make use of illustrated children's books, films and TV-series, to further the discussion. The tenth chapter discusses the findings of the study in general terms and problematizes the contemporary trend of autofiction and its implications with regards to this study.

Several chapters or parts of chapters have been discussed and presented in various forms at conferences, both international and national, and this has proven important to the development of the project and the direction it has taken. I have furthermore been invited to present my research at a couple of upcoming conferences, one in Glasgow and one in Gothenburg, In my work as a freelance critic, I have furthermore been able to discuss different aspects of my project in a public arena. In April 2009, I organized a three-day seminar called "Universal Childhood and Particular Children: the Literary Construction of Childhood Revisited", at the American Comparative Literature Association's conference at Harvard, and had the opportunity to discuss my project with researchers from several countries who themselves work on related projects. As a result of my research I have also been asked to participate in the U.S., four-volume Nordic Literary History, which is funded by ACLA and led by Steven Sondrup and Mark Sandberg. In it, I will write about Nordic literature on the basis of my project.

During the course of the project, I have found a few issues to be increasingly important. Romanticism's notions about children, childhood, and the inner life of the child have proven to be very sustainable in fiction despite all the changes in the child's position in Swedish society. Second, it is striking that a Swedish childhood narrative prototype clearly stands out: a mid-twentieth-century, safe, rural or small-town childhood is the scheme of popular childhood narratives. This becomes even more evident when picture books and films are added to the study. Thirdly, the importance of sexuality in many Swedish childhood narratives is quite great, especially as a threshold phenomenon. The sexual awakening is, in most cases, the point at which childhood ends, in a pattern that evokes the myth of the expulsion from Eden. In the depiction of children, sexuality is rarely given a positive role. There are also observations to be made gender-wise: it is often a woman who puts and end to man's happy childhood, while the female sexual awakening, while portrayed less frequently, often is spelled out as a force of inner nature, and not as a result of male seduction. My hypothesis - that childhood stories only in exeptional cases relate to children, but rather are about the adult perspective - has proven to be quite valid.

Until the monograph and the essay written for the Nordic Literary History project are finished, the projects's main publications are the articles "Remembering and Recreating Childhood in the Works of Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg" in Hopkins et al (eds) Negotiating Childhood, Oxford, Interdisciplinary Press 2011, and "Through the Eyes of a Child. Childhoood and Mass Dictatorship in Modern European Literature" in Sarsenov et al (eds) Imagining Mass Dictatorships, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2012 (under publication). In the former, I discuss how Bergman's and Strindberg's childhood narratives thematizes the adult narrator and how the narrative are used as implicit self-portraits of the adult protagonists. In the latter I explore how child focalization has been used in different ways and with different aims in the depictions of children in twentieth century dictatorships written by Thomas Bernhard, Italo Calvino, György Dragomán, Juan Goytisolo, Herta Müller and Christa Wolf.

Publications

ykvist, Karin (2012) ”Through the Eyes of a Child. Childhood and Mass Dictatorship in Modern European Literature”. I Sarsenov et al. (red.) Imagining Mass Dictatorships, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan (under utg.)

Nykvist, Karin (2010) ”Remembering and Recreating Childhood in the Works of Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg.” I Hopkins et al. (red.) Negotiating Childhoods. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. ISBN 978-1-84888-046-7.

Nykvist, Karin (2008)”Än ljuder kattens silverhorn”. I Sjöberg, B. (red.) Våra favoriter bland Viktor Rydbergs dikter. Lund: Absalon. ISBN 9789188396266.

Konferensbidrag

”Children of Dictatorships: The Use of Child Focalization in European Novels on Totalitarianism”. Brown University 29 mars – 1 april 2012.

”Childhood under totalitarianism in the European novel”, Remembering Dictatorship: State socialist pasts in post-socialist presents, University of Bristol, 15-17 september 2011.

”Remembering and recreating childhood in the works of Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg”, Childhood conference, Mansfield College, Oxford, 3-5 juli 2010.

"Barn blir till", Tvärvetenskaplig barnkulturforskardag, Centrum för barnkulturforskning, Stockholm, 8 maj 2009.

”Remembering romantically: Swedish Childhood Recounts in the Context of European Romanticism”, American Comparative Literature Association, Harvard University, 26-29 mars 2009.

”Truth and Fictions. Reinventing and Remembering Childhood in the Autobiographical Works of Ingmar Bergman, ” American Comparative Literature Association, University of Southern California, 24-27 april 2008.

”The Century of the Child Begins. Constructing Childhood in Swedish Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies, Mississippi University, Oxford, Mississippi, maj 2006.