Barn skriver också litteratur : Ett sociokulturellt perspektiv på skrivande, litteratur och läsning

Sammanfattning: In this essay, I endeavour to broaden the concept of literature by introducing five children’s literary works. Primarily, literary scholars have concentrated their studies on literature written by adults, regarding children as readers rather than writers. I believe that such a concept fails to cover the diversity of the literary field and therefore needs to change. Approaching writing and reading from a sociocultural point of view, and reading children’s stories from a narratological perspective, I intend to show that a new concept of literature is not only possible but inevitable. Due to the dialectic relationship between sender and receiver, literary and linguistic conventions and deviations, the definition of literature is renegotiated continuously. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu emphasized the impact of the academy by illustrating that scholars are maintaining literary norms when putting titles on reading lists and acknowledging certain authorships. Writing this essay is thus a pledge of change. Adult research of children’s literary work encompasses a wide range of implicit age-related power issues (aetonormativity), according to the Swedish literary scholar, Maria Nikolajeva. In this essay, I show an insufficiency of some of these adult literary concepts when applied to children’s writing. I conclude that a partly new terminology, based on children’s writing, needs to co-exist with the older set of concepts. I also emphasize the need for further literary studies on children’s writing to question, criticize and complete mine, and to acknowledge the variety of literary aspects in children’s writing.