Anpassade för tillfället : Bruket av personvers i Norrköpings Tidningar 1760 till 1869

Sammanfattning: Occasional poetry was a well-known genre when the local newspapers in the middle of the eighteenth century were established in Sweden. Through the establishment of the papers occasional poetry also became a part of the papers. The purpose of this dissertation is to study the use of occasional poetry in the Swedish newspaper Nörrkopings Tidningar in the period 1760-1869. The study has shown that 241 individual occasional poems were published in the paper during the six ten-year periods that have been examined. These poems form the corpus of the present thesis.Theoretically this dissertation aims at looking at occasional poetry as texts whose purpose is utility. Hence occasional poetry is not seen as a text within the genre offiction (belles-lettres), and for that reason its qualities are less aesthetic than functional. Emphasize on function laysstress upon that a message is communicated from a sender to an intended receiver. As a result of the need of an intended receiver the study calls attention towards what a recontextualization implies for the understanding of the message that is presented by the poems.The study of occasional poems published in newspapers has confronted the fact that the term addressee is too imprecise in connection with the study of newspaper texts. The study also deals with questions such as how the poems were presented in the papers, how the funeral poems related to the obituary notices, and to what extent the poems in the paper also were printed separately. The study has shown that the poems apart from being published for example as complimentary poems in connection with appointments or as expressions of condolences, also were used for purposes as illustrative elements in articles, as news items and as readings. In this way the study has raised the question of what constitutes occasional poetry as a genre. The different ways to use the poems also have displayed various ways to read and interpret the occasional poem in general.