https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1306300
With a Global Market in Mind: Agents, Authors, and the Dissemination of Contemporary Swedish Crime Fiction
Karl Berglund
The author uses the example of Swedish crime fiction in the 2000s to point out how peripheral and local attributes of popular fiction are used as global sell- ing arguments, and how such trends, in turn, always depend on book market structure. One of the essay’s main points is that the book trade and the fiction it distributes are always closely intertwined. First, the author sketches the Swedish background to the rise of crime fiction and literary agents. Then, he con- nects this development to the bigger changes in the global book trade. Finally, he considers the terms world literature and the global-local distinction, and argues for what he understands as a market-driven literature produced with the intention of becoming world
Keywords: Swedish crime fiction, Swedish literary agents, David Lagercrantz, Stieg Larsson, world literature, global book trade, translation rights, local vs. global, market-driven literature
Translated from English: Milena Popova
Translated from: Nilsson, L., D. Damrosch, and T. D’haen. Crime Fiction as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
About the author: Karl Berglund is Assistant Professor in literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research interests include popular genre literature, studies of publishers and readers, sociology of literature, etc. His dissertation “Mordens marknad: Litteratursociologiska studier i det tidiga 2000-talets svenska kriminallitteratur” (A Market of Murders: Sociological Literary Studies in Swedish Crime Fiction in the Early 21st Century) investigates the commercial success of Swedish crime fiction in the 2000s and how book trade structures interconnect with the fictions it distributes. He has published several articles and two monographs on the subject: “Deckarboomen under lupp” (“Crime Boom Investigated,” 2012) and “Mordförpackningar” (“Packaging Murder,” 2016).
