Mellan två stolar : Författarskap i Sverige med ungerskspråkig bakgrund 1945–2015

The aim of this thesis is to map and analyse literature written by authors with a Hungarian-language background who moved to Sweden between 1945 and 2015, and who have published literary works in book format. From the perspective of the sociology of literature, this thesis focuses on publishing channels and possibilities, the authors’ and their works places in the literary value system and feed-back in the form of reviews, but also choice of language, theme, and genre. The approach of the research for this thesis is new in Hungarian and Swedish literary studies, as the literary works are analysed irrespective of the language in which they are written. The research corpus consists of both Hungarian and Swedish literary works and one book in English. The second chapter presents the research that Hungarian researchers have conducted on Hungarian migration literature and offers an overview of the questions and results arising from this research. The authors with a Hungarian-language background in Sweden were divided into four groups, based on the time of their migration to Sweden. Four chapters, which comprise the analytic part of the thesis, present and analyse the author groups and their literary activities regarding language, purpose of any code-switching, chosen theme, and genre. The first group consists of authors who migrated to Sweden during the decade after the Second World War (1945–1955). The second group came between 1956 and 1958 in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The third group consists of Hungarians who moved to Sweden during the communist era, between 1959 and 1989. Finally, the fourth group came after the fall of communism (1990–2015). As many as half of the authors chose either Hungarian or Swedish as their language and there are surprisingly few authors working in both languages. The publishing channels depend on the literary works language and theme, and only half of the books have been published at established publishers. The literary works of these authors are categorized as Swedish-Hungarian migration literature. Literary history works until now have neglected these type of literatures, but it is imperative that the study of literature finds a way to acknowledge, include, position, and group them