All roads lead to fantasy : a study of how fantasy-reading BHS-students obtain fiction

Fantasy literature has a rather strong position in countries with an English-speaking population but not in Sweden. The supply of fantasy in Sweden is much smaller than that in for example United Kingdom. Does this affect the Swedish readers of this genre? If it does, how does it affect them? The aim of this thesis is to find out how a few fantasy-reading students at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science get hold of the fiction they want to read and who and/or what influence their decision of which book to read. In order to avoid confusion we are also going to try to find out how they define fantasy since it varies from person to person what is included in the genre. To get a result we interviewed eight students using the method of qualitative interviews. Then we analyzed the result using George Kingsley Zipf’s principle of least effort, the theory of the economic man and Patrick Wilson’s cognitive authority. The result show that almost all of the students have the same definition of fantasy and uses different ways to get hold of fantasy compared to how they get hold of other kinds of fiction. It also shows that most of them have different influences when choosing a book in the genre of fantasy and when choosing a book from a different genre.Uppsatsnivå: