In Search of Legitimacy: Class, Gender and Moral Discipline in Early Swedish Working-Class literature c. 1910

Abstract

This paper deals with certain tensions in early Swedish working-class literature of the first generation, c. 1910. These texts were a Gebrauchsliteratur— a literature for use in the class struggle of the time—but the use primarily was existential and political reflection, and it was effected by special (non-acknowledged) aesthetic means that did not conform to the aesthetics of the current literary institution. This literature was thus mainly considered illegitimate, and the theme of my paper is the tension between what might be called Gebrauchsliteratur and Kunstliteratur in the modern (post-romantic) era. I will argue that this tension is between two different aesthetics, which is to say that the conception of a Gebrauchsliteratur—a literature for use—presupposes a certain aesthetic and that this aesthetic requires certain non-aesthetic (or noncanonized) kinds of reading in order to be discovered.1 Only if accepted in its aesthetic otherness may the peculiar potential of these texts make itself felt, an otherness both cognitively and normatively unfamiliar.