During the 18th century, the publishing of literature was commercialised in Sweden. The process was intimately connected to the rise of the modern novel and paved the wave for a new type of author. These authors wrote for a large audience and portrayed the everyday life of the ordinary man, not just kings and knights as in the old tales and poems. Historians and literary scholars have recently argued that the 18th century novel can be a productive source of economic knowledge by showing the inner motivations and moral ideas connected to the material world. Previous studies have argued that the 18th century novel can be viewed as moral guidelines for consumption. In this thesis, I argue something more profound: that the novel can be seen as moral guidelines for the whole of the economic life at the dawn of the modern-day economy.  This thesis analyses novels, written between 1839-1860, by three of the most sold and most influential of the new novelists in the form of Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Emilie Flygare-Carlén and Fredrika Bremer. By using Luc Boltanski's and Laurent Thévenot's theory of justification I show how the novels inscribed different moral ideas into economic life. The study shows that the idea of the moral merchant and moral market is prevalent in most of the novels. They speak to a need for moral market actors to counteract immoral and selfish actors.

<p>Ulla Isaksson (1916 – 2000) wrote many novels, often with a woman or several women as protagonists. In <em>Dit du icke vill</em> (“Where Thou Willst Not”) from 1956 she depicts a crisis of faith in a woman, which would not have been successful had she chosen a contemporary setting. She uses an adequate historical framework, the prosecution of witches in Sweden in the 17^th century, well documented in reliable sources. Her novel includes a message about oppression of women, manifest in patriarchal ambition to control ancient wisdom about healing and herbs and the denial of pre-Christian habits that include knowledge about female fertility, earlier exercised by midwives and wise women and men.</p><p>In “The Root of Evil” the novel is placed in a feminist tradition, where the author, like older writers like Fredrika Bremer, Ellen Key and Elin Wägner, pleads for “social mothering”.  A major difference is that, in her own life, Ulla Isaksson has experienced pregnancy, giving birth and breastfeeding which none of the pioneering Swedish feminist writers had. Emilia Fogelklou, pioneering theologian, wrote about witches as wise women, a study that influenced Ulla Isaksson. The witches are described as mirroring Hanna “the Good Mother”. Their fantasies about life at “Blåkulla” are similar to the everyday life at a wealthy farmstead. This kind of mirroring reminds of the theories of Gilbert and Gubar, who assume that female writers in the 19^th Century hid their revolt against patriarchy in mad women, like “The Madwoman in the Attic” in Jane Eyre. In the 1950s, golden age of the Swedish housewife, a female writer might well hide her anger at the circumscribed role model dedicated to women in a similar use of Anti-Women. The real witches clearly contrast the obedient protagonist, a true “Angel in the house”.</p><p>The villagers´ struggle to clear the ground from the ensnaring roots that hinder the male prosecution of witches imply a symbolic reading: this evil root is ancient matriarchal knowledge of childbearing and birth control. A theory on the original causes for the witch hunts in western Europe is introduced: the population sank in the 15^th century and one reason, beside plagues, starvation and warfare, was that women aware of how to prevent childbearing and giving birth to a lot of children were killed during the witch hunt. Churches and kings introduced the prosecution of witches and wise women, including midwives.</p>

Ulla Isaksson (1916 – 2000) wrote many novels, often with a woman or several women as protagonists. In Dit du icke vill (“Where Thou Willst Not”) from 1956 she depicts a crisis of faith in a woman, which would not have been successful had she chosen a contemporary setting. She uses an adequate historical framework, the prosecution of witches in Sweden in the 17th century, well documented in reliable sources. Her novel includes a message about oppression of women, manifest in patriarchal ambition to control ancient wisdom about healing and herbs and the denial of pre-Christian habits that include knowledge about female fertility, earlier exercised by midwives and wise women and men. In “The Root of Evil” the novel is placed in a feminist tradition, where the author, like older writers like Fredrika Bremer, Ellen Key and Elin Wägner, pleads for “social mothering”.  A major difference is that, in her own life, Ulla Isaksson has experienced pregnancy, giving birth and breastfeeding which none of the pioneering Swedish feminist writers had. Emilia Fogelklou, pioneering theologian, wrote about witches as wise women, a study that influenced Ulla Isaksson. The witches are described as mirroring Hanna “the Good Mother”. Their fantasies about life at “Blåkulla” are similar to the everyday life at a wealthy farmstead. This kind of mirroring reminds of the theories of Gilbert and Gubar, who assume that female writers in the 19th Century hid their revolt against patriarchy in mad women, like “The Madwoman in the Attic” in Jane Eyre. In the 1950s, golden age of the Swedish housewife, a female writer might well hide her anger at the circumscribed role model dedicated to women in a similar use of Anti-Women. The real witches clearly contrast the obedient protagonist, a true “Angel in the house”. The villagers´ struggle to clear the ground from the ensnaring roots that hinder the male prosecution of witches imply a symbolic reading: this evil root is ancient matriarchal knowledge of childbearing and birth control. A theory on the original causes for the witch hunts in western Europe is introduced: the population sank in the 15th century and one reason, beside plagues, starvation and warfare, was that women aware of how to prevent childbearing and giving birth to a lot of children were killed during the witch hunt. Churches and kings introduced the prosecution of witches and wise women, including midwives.