The Comics in the Swedish Library Press 1960-1999

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to study how the comics have been evaluated and debated in the Swedish library press from 1960 to 1999. Have they been seen as something good or something bad? What arguments have been put forward against them or in their defense? What kinds of development can be seen over time? The point of doing this, is of course that evaluation always plays a crucial part in library work. By studying how a "new" medium or art form has been evaluated in the past, we can hopefully gain a greater understanding of how today’s newcomers should best be treated. Theoretically, this thesis is grounded in Bourdieu’s theory about cultural distinctions. Content analysis has been used as the basic method, and complemented with a study about the positions from which different persons write about comics. In other words it's a basically statistical study, but great care has been taken not to forget the individual texts’ specific content and context. The results show that the acceptance for comics has increased since the sixties, but at the same time the interest in comics seems to have lessened. In the nineties, very few texts in the library press concerned themselves with these. The common understanding, at least among comic readers, that the libraries into the eighties were massively hostile towards comics, is proven wrong though. Much of the criticism against comics seems to have been grounded in a fear of what bad comics could do to the children, and a broadly speaking ideological criticism has been dominant. But at the same time it's obvious that general cultural and political tendencies has worked in the comics’ favour.Uppsatsnivå: