The image of the girl in Swedish youth literature : A literature analysis of nine youth novels from a gender perspective.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how the image of the girl and her environment in the Swedish youth literature has changed during the 1980s to the 2000s. We have focused on how the girls creates gender in fiction. The introduction chapter in this essay covers a short history over Swedish youth literature and how the Swedish youth culture has developed, followed by a description of how the girl in the real world relates to gender. The books we have chosen are written by Swedish authors and the plot partakes in Sweden with female protagonists. We decided to do a close-reading of the novels and analyse them by an analytical model, consisting of several questions. Our study is based upon the theories of Yvonne Hirdman, Ylva Elwin-Nowak and Heléne Thomsson, regarding gender and how it is constructed. We found that the image of the girl in Swedish youth literature was not consistent over our chosen time-period. The girls in the novels from the 1980s and the 2000s rebelled against how others thought how they should act and live, while the girls in the novels from the 1990s didnt feel that they needed to rebel at all. The role of the mothers was often criticized from the girls point of view, the mothers work to much etc. The role of the father, when mentioned, however, was not criticized in the same way. Instead they were portrayed as being too controlling or simply fading into the background.Uppsatsnivå: