The purpose of this master’s thesis is to describe by a gender approach what ideas and values are expressed in the novel One Night at Bullar Lake and how they do coincide to a tendency. We also want to discuss authority and class divisions and how these can be connected to the novel and the author. Our final question is to examine in what way the voice of the female author is represented in the novel. To approach our material we use Yvonne Hirdman’s theories about the construction of sexes and Susan Sniader Lanser’s work about voices of female authors, as well as Horace Engdahl’s studies about the silent voice in literature. We also use Pierre Bourdieu’s theories regarding the discussion about class divisions and authority. The method used for analysing the novel is a descriptive idea analysis where we have developed two ideal types on the basis of Åsa Arping’s research concerning the female situation around the 1840`s. The result of the study shows a novel with several meanings. Apart from the religious theme about the revivalist movement which the novel is based on, appear questions concerning the self-fulfilment and independence of women. The novel can be seen as an example of how female authors could find a way to express themselves in a literary world dominated by men.

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.