Fäderneslandets rätta beskrivning : Mötet mellan antikvarisk forskning och ekonomisk nyttokult i 1700-talets Sverige

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the thesis is to deepen our understanding the meaning of the term "fatherland" as it was used in eighteenth- century Sweden. It is commonly known that the term could represent a local or cultural community as well as a national and political one. The Swedish realm consisted of several parts of which Finland was one important part. A topic of debate has been to what degree authors recognized a national community stretching over these cultural boarders. This topic is also treated in this thesis. The source material used consists mainly of topographical descriptions of towns, parishes and counties. An important task is to investigate to what degree the literature used these two quite different representations of community. The thesis is structured around four main questions which will shed light on how this genre represented the fatherland in different ways: 1) How did this literature develop regarding its volume/frequency, contents and general character? 2) How did different actors perceive the need to describe the fatherland? 3) How was the fatherland described in these topographical descriptions? 4) Which where the identifications expressed in the descriptions? In order to answer these questions, not only printed material is used but also the correspondence and manuscripts of contemporary authors.