Abstract
This study comprises a history of the Swedish-language literature written in Finland. It employs a sociological methodology stemming from Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the autonomous literary field, presented especially in his work The Rules of Art (1992 in the French original).
The field has its intellectual and commercial pole. Authors choose their genres and styles from a certain space of possibles, and seek to obtain specific or commercial recognition in a struggle between the protagonists of the field.
The struggle concerns the definition of quality literature. The protagonists include, in addition to writers or writers' groups, for example, publishers; a key role in this struggle is played by literary critics as well as literary scholars, who canonize the authors, and in the Finland-Swedish case also by avant-garde literary magazines.
As Bourdieu's concept of class presumes, the protagonists possess certain capital (economic, cultural, social or literary) which is connected with social and geographical origin as well as gender. The topic is defined by the actual birth of this minority literature in the beginning of the 20th century up until the present day.
The study begins with the first generation formed around the magazine Euterpe. An important part of the Finland-Swedish canon consists of works by the modernist generation, whose story began in 1916 and continued for many decades.
As the Bourdieusian analysis views literary debates and revolts as the moments in which the field most clearly reveals its structure, the period of the large-scale social dynamics of the 1960s and 1970s is described through the perspective of two extensive Finland-Swedish literary debates from 1965 and 1975-1976. Attention is also devoted to literature which was partially oriented toward the commercial pole, such as juvenile, popular or rural literature.
The final chapter deals with contemporary Finland-Swedish prose and poetry, i.e. that written after 1990.