Orientalism i Pippi Långstrumps och Ture Sventons världar

Sammanfattning: This essay aims to display how orientalism is incorporating itself through children's literature. By understanding orientalism as a hegemonic discourse, and examining it through a foucaultian discourse analysis, my soul purpose is to discuss wether orientalism gains strength and viability through the works of authors. The result show that the orientalistic discourse feeds itself by affecting the authors from outside and confirming itself in the works written by those authors. Direct and subliminal values and representations that decide and confirm an alternate reality through the readers’ eyes, as well as through the authors’, are found and discussed. The paper also discusses the possibility of the single author to alter the orientalistic paradigm. Although this is a possibility it is not likely. The more plausible alternative is that the authors, as a group, have the power to either strengthen or undermine the orientalistic discourse as a whole. The single children’s literature author can, however, if being widely popular, alter the orientalistic discourse string that is children’s literature and thus provide orientalism with more knowledge and power. In conclusion I provide a short discussion on the subject of reading children’s literature from another time as what it is; a historical artifact to help understand the way people viewed other people in the past.