Förlaget och novellen : En studie av Bokförlaget Forums inställning till novellutgivning

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay is to examine the attitudes towards publication of short stories, carried by the employees of Bokförlaget Forum, a randomly chosen Swedish publishing house. The study seeks to investigate the causes behind and consequences of the attitudes, as well as their generality. Through qualitative interviews, carried out with five of the company’s employees, the short story is defined as a problematic genre, mainly due to its low commercial success. The conclusions drawn from the interviews are put into a historical perspective, where the developments of the short story-genre, as well as that of the modern Swedish book market, are discussed. By putting Forum into the context of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories about cultural fields, the company’s behaviour in connection to the short story is further analyzed. The main finding of the study is that the Swedish short story of today is viewed as a difficult, high qualitative literary genre. A commercial publishing house like Forum therefore has an impossible task when trying to win success by launching short stories. Due to the genre’s low expected gains the publishers of Forum only accept short story manuscripts with an extremely high literary quality, and thus reinforces the role of the short story as a “difficult” genre. The study defines this profile as the consequence of a combination of increased commercialism and dislocation of power in the book market, altered publishing conditions for short stories, and an experimental literary label that clings on.