Bortom ödelandet : En studie i Stina Aronsons författarskap

Sammanfattning: This thesis deals with the writing of Stina Aronson. The main objective is to study how Aronson (1892–1956) developed as a writer in a contempory cultural context, as well as to revise the image of Aronson as a provincial writer. Aronson’s literary output stands at the centre of the investigation, and a crucial task has been to study how gender affected her work as an author.It took a long time for Aronson to find her footing in the literary field, and the different chapters of the thesis correspond to fresh starts and sudden turns in her writing. Generally speaking, Aronson was sensitive to the shifts and changes in literary sensibility. In the 1920s she adheres to an idyllic aesthetic, characteristic of the period, whereas in the ’30s she approaches more modernist modes of writing. Not until the 1940s was Aronson finally recognised as a major writer. Her writing now became devoted to the lives of people in a remote part of the country, while she employed different idioms. This resulted in what this thesis theorises as a dialectical mode of narration, enabling the narrator to observe a rural, far northern community from the inside and outside simultaneously.Marginality, in class as well as gender terms, is a consistent motif in Aronson’s fiction. In both her early and late work one finds powerless, eccentric characters who experience great difficuly in securing a position in society. The gap between the haves and have-nots is a recurring theme, as is the narrator’s desire to overcome this disparity.In her later work, one discerns a civilisational critique of the privilege to define others. Aronson’s contrasting ideal is that of tolerance towards strangeness, difference and alterity, in terms of novelistic content as well as narrative technique. In this way, her work takes an ethical turn that underscores the equal worth of all human beings and, as a consequence, modifies the received image of Aronson as a provincial writer.