Text och tolkning i svenska författarbiografier : Elin Wägners Selma Lagerlöf, Elisabeth Tykessons Atterbom och Fredrik Bööks Verner von Heidenstam

Sammanfattning: The aim of the present thesis is twofold: to examine literary biography as literary text and, on the basis of my findings, to adopt a reasonable perspective on the theoretical debate about the fictionality of such biographies. In my introduction I trace the theoretical developments underlying this metaperspective and supply with an historical survey of literary biography as practised in Sweden. In the three main chapters I study the writing of Elin Wägner’s Selma Lagerlöf (1942-1943), Elisabeth Tykesson’s Atterbom (1954) and Fredrik Böök’s Verner von Heidenstam (1945-46), paying close attention to the literary and rhetorical characteristics of these literary biographies. The interpretative work of the biographers is examined with regard to the material at my disposal, their social and personal profiles and the completed biographies. My attempts to find points of contact between Leon Edel’s and Ira B. Nadel’s poetics – and thus to connect the rhetorical analyses with the psychological expression of the biographers’ interpretations – are based on Nadel’s structuring of the texts on two levels, a diachronical and linear one using what he refers to as ‘history as metaphor’ and a synchronical and cyclical one using ‘myth as metaphor’. The latter, which is assumed to express the biographer’s interpretation and has been described as a structure revealing an emotional commitment on the biographer’s part, can be uncovered with the help of rhetorical analysis, and the result can in its turn be compared with similar expressions or themes in the biographer’s other works. The biographers’ interpretations have been related to the general perception of the authors before and after the publication of the biographies. In order to examine the reception of the new view and the contemporaneous perception of the aesthetics of the biographies and their status as scholarly works, I have studied a number of reviews of the three texts under scrutiny as well as of the later editions of Selma Lagerlöf (1958) and Verner von Heidenstam (1959). In my conclusion I bring up for discussion some of the arguments which have been used to lend support to the idea of literary biography as a fictional type of text, and I discuss their relevance with examples taken from my results. The standpoint I finally adopt as my own involves a dismissal of the postmodern philosophy of language as insufficient for developing a theory about biography. Ethical reasons make it necessary to involve an historical and social context and convention in its theoretical formation.