The small people in the big picture : Children in Swedish working-class novels of the 1930s

When the story of Scandinavian literature is being told in an international context, the Swedish proletarian novels of the 1930s are frequently held up as the more important of the regional canon. 1 In these celebrated novels, childhood and children are at the center-so much so, that I would suggest that the child is one of the more prominent motifs of Swedish literature between the two World Wars. Narratives on childhood were not new in any way in the Swedish or Nordic context during this period, but these novels told of childhood at a pivotal moment in history, when the child figure and the role played by childrearing in the forming of the nation were the subjects of animated discussion. 2 And they told of childhood in a new way, from the unprivileged point of view of the child. Many titles were published, but among the more widely read-and therefore the scope of this text-were Ivar Lo-Johansson’s Breaking Free (1933), Eyvind Johnson’s cycle of four novels named The Novel of Olof (1934-1937), Harry Martinson’s Flowering Nettle (1935), and Moa Martinson’s trilogy about Mia, My Mother Gets Married (1936), Church Wedding (1938) and The King’s Roses (1939)