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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-530277 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Dalgard, Henrik |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för idéhistoria |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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