Vampyr och nagelbitare : En genre- och diskursanalys av barn- och ungdomsrysare och deras ämnesord

Sammanfattning: This master's thesis in Library and Information Science examines how the genre division of the horror fictionis constructed at the children and youth department of a library by studying subject headings of the titles.The aim is to examine what is included in the genre, in the two labelings called vampire and nail-biter/spine-chiller, what separates them, and what difference there is between children and youth thrillers/horror fiction. Also the cover designs and how readers portray these books are studied. The study is made in order to develop the knowledge of the genre to help librarians and borrowers. The great popularity of the genre among borrowers and people in general, and the importance of having knowledge of things that borrowers are interested in, are the motivation of performing the study. The method is a case study and conducted with and based on genre theory which shows how a genre is defined, how it can be divided and what conventions there are for the horror fiction in particular. Discourse analysis helps to see in between what frames the thriller is constructed, and how these elements subdivide the genre and influence it and those who encounter it, library borrowers and librarians. Di-scourse analysis also examines the standards of the thriller.The analysis showed that the discourse of horror fiction includes both the expected features, in terms ofgenre conventions, such as ghosts and vampires, and more commonplace such as sisters. The differences and similarities of these parts in the genre were discussed and compared in the light of discourse analysis and genre theory in order to reveal how these constructions might influence the readers and the borrowers. The major conc-lusions of the study is that the encounter between the unexpected and menacing, and the everyday life is what makes the thriller frightening, now as in history, and so it follows its genre conventions. The discourse of the hor-ror fiction standards are difficult to influence by being expected of borrowers and otherwise they are not thrillers. The study has shown that certain subjects recur more often than other which may affect the borrower in its per-ception of the genre. The genre division helps giving the borrower different kinds of frights and experiences. The joint is that the supernatural is present in the whole genre and convey feelings of excitement and fear which is the most important representative of the genre. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.