Jag – en litteraturhistoria. : Fjärrläsningar av förstapersonsperspektiv i svensk fiktionsprosa under hundra år

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this master thesis is to study the evolution of first-person perspective in Swedish prose fiction from 1920–2020, using a digital mode of literary analysis, i.e. distant reading. With a dialectical view on the relations between form and content in literature, and a theoretical framework drawing from Yvonne Hirdmans views on historical gender formations, the essay aims to answer questions such as if first-person perspective is more common in contemporary literature than in earlier publications, if there are certain words especially present in literature written in the first-person, and if there are any generalizable patterns concerning gender, genre or literary prestige in the historical development of the first-person perspective. The analysis is divided into three parts. The first quantitatively classifies narrative point of view in the works of the corpus, through measures such as the relative share and distribution of first-person pronouns. The second part examines overrepresented words in the corpus, in relation to the results from part one and aspects such as gender and chronology. The third part contextualizes the results through a comparative reading of two novels from the study’s corpus. The thesis concludes that first-person perspective is three times as prominent in literature written during the 2010s than the 1920s. It is also evident that the principal shift takes place during the 1980s. Even though this transformation exemplifies a broader shift in society towards individualism, it is most pertinent to literary fiction. A central point of the thesis is also that first-person perspective is not to be seen as a monolith, and that while broader distinctions between the contents of literature written in first- and third-person is evident, the narrative “I” has also undergone significant changes during the examined period.