Arbetet består av en analys av boken Hey Dolly av Amanda Svensson med fokus på genusidentiteter och hur Dolly representerar den nya kvinnan. Hey Dolly innehållertraditionella kvinno- och mansroller men personerna i boken bryter också mot de traditionellagenusidentiteterna.Den nya sortens kvinna som Dolly representerar är en person som pendlar mellan rollerna och utmanar. Hon kämpar med sin genusidentitet och öppnar slutligen upp för alla att befinna sig i en gråzon. Resultatet blir en ny genusidentitet där en man kan vara mjuk och manlig och enkvinna kan vara hård men kvinnlig. Dolly tänker inte välja och tycker inte att andra ska behöva välja heller.

This essay is a study of the Swedish author Amanda Svensson’s novel Hey Dolly (2008). The aim of the study is to investigate the conflict that occurs in the storytelling because of the untruthful narrator Dolly. Using the terms story and discourse, from a method of narratology by Maria Nikolajeva, the purpose is to analyze how the narrator manipulates the reader’s comprehension of what is real and not in the text. The term story represents the reality while discourse embodies the fantasy world, and by separating the two from each other and then comparing them the conflict clarifies as well as the understanding of Dolly. The results of the analysis show that there are several differences between the story and the discourse which various situations illustrate. It also becomes clear that Dolly only focalizes herself and thereby manages to control the reader’s perspective of the told story. But in the dialogue with other persons in the text it reveals that she is not being truthful. The conclusion is that Dolly lives her dream life through the fantasy and that the discourse is a way to defend her against situations she finds too hard to handle.

This essay is a study of three fiction novels by the Swedish author Amanda Svensson: Hey Dolly (2008), Välkommen till den här världen (2011) and Allt det där jag sa till dig var sant (2014). A unified theme for the novels is identity making where the three young female protagonists try different identities and explore who they are. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate in which ways the protagonists explore their identities and how this is expressed. Gender theory and genre theory are used when analyzing the characters in the novels. In the analysis it becomes clear that the protagonists explore their identities in different ways. The three young women are aware of that they live in a society in which male and female gender stereotypes exist. In some cases they adjust to the gender roles but in many cases they also observe the gender stereotypes and problematize them. Therefore the protagonists sometimes differ from how a stereotype woman is portrayed.

Adapting the concept of the ”popular cultural memory” and its necessary “context knowledge” established by Karin Kukkonen, this bachelor thesis seeks to examine how this memory is “at work” and expresses itself in contemporary fiction, by doing an intertextual reading of the swedish author Amanda Svensson's debut Hey Dolly. Within the intertextual structures of Hey Dolly the reader encounters allusions and references that address almost everything from contemporary popular culture to established authors in the swedish canon, mainly as means for the characters to help them express their emotions and thoughts, by “choosing” from already available content of popular culture to use and modify. The intertextuality alluding to the popular cultural memory does at the same time address the concept of the ideal reader throughout the novel. This ideal reader is addressed by the narrator as one of those “in the know”, as competent enough to see this “popular cultural memory” at work in the novel by “getting” these intertextual allusions and references. Thus any (real) reader has to be equipped with the same expertise of popular culture as the narrator in order to fully understand this intertextuality. The intertextual practices of Hey Dolly should be understood as traits used by the author to express and implicate her/his awareness of the texts “surroundings”, traits indeed found even in the name of Hey Dolly's main protagonist, symptomatically influenced from contemporary, western American commercial culture. Given the premiss where this intertextual framework relies on a heavily contemporary influenced popular cultural context, it potentially would run the risk of not being understood, should future popular culture contexts operate under different premisses. In this regard the high cultural canon memory would have to be regarded as being more stable and “reliable” than the popular cultural memory, as the norms for the canon are more fixed and rarely negotiated.  Arguing that this intertextual reading of Hey Dolly is of an immense value and significant for understanding how the Zeitgeist operates and should be approached, this thesis is still based on the premiss where the intertextual reading of Hey Dolly has largely been nonexistent when looking at how Hey Dolly has been received. Instead in the swedish media we find a consistent dominance of how its reception has been read from almost exclusively a gendered point of view, where Hey Dolly is seen and regarded as the forthcoming of a new representation of the girl/woman ideal. The intertextual reading of Hey Dolly would instead be regarded as “secondary” at best, where the story by itself is self sufficient, even if the reader lacks the necessary context knowledge of how this ”popular cultural memory” is at work in the text.