Den lekande Fröding: en författarskapsstudie

The dissertation examines the collected literary works of Gustaf Fröding (1860-1911), from which it unearths a vital, yet hitherto unrecognised dimension: Fröding at play. The opening chapter accounts for how the concept of play has been made use of in previous literary research and elaborates, by way of an inter-disciplinary transfer of concept and with Fröding's chalice poem "En pligt-dikt" as key text, a literary play model. The second chapter, also serving an introductory function, discusses the phenomenon of play as a specific feature of occasional literature and claims that an occasional literary structure, conditioned by an enlarged recipient attention, at a broad level characterizes Fröding's achievements as an author. The subsequent four main chapters, by turns, thoroughly investigate the verbal play, the intertextual play, the pseudonymous play, and the metaliterary play within Fröding's text corpus; his frequently neglected prose writings - causeries, dialect stories, essays, reviews, and letters - are throughout the analyses treated on the same terms as his poems. By consistently highlighting the interaction between the two components of the model, the textually experimental play strategies and the reader-directed play pact, the dissertation elucidates a central dynamism in Fröding's oeuvre. The final chapter scrutinizes the negative stance taken by earlier Fröding scholars towards the play dimension of his works and closes by constructing an alternative, ludic authorship canon.