En outsider och en gentleman

Mediala mytbilder av Bo Cavefors bokförlag

Abstract

An Outsider and a Gentleman. Bo Cavefors’s Publishing and Two Mythical Archetypes of the Western Book Market

This article aims to examine how contemporary literary criticism and statements from the publisher Bo Cavefors contributed to the construction of his public image. Bo Cavefors’s Swedish publishing house was active between the years 1959 and 1979. The company’s book list attracted notable attention from the literary media of the time, and was considered to be both economically and culturally ”daring”. It was a multifaceted publication list, containing genres such as contemporary Swedish poetry, drama and fiction, along with Marxist theory and politically controversial writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernst Jünger and Ulrike Meinhof. The publishing house had a reputation for ”good taste” and for offering literature of ”high literary quality”, but the publisher himself was often portrayed as an eccentric. This combination of qualities seems to have generated a contradictory reputation for the publishing house – a reputation both at odds with, and in tune with, its cultural and political context: the Swedish cultural sphere of the 1960’s and 70’s. The article argues that unquestioned power relations and masculinity norms manifest themselves in two myths surrounding the publisher Cavefors: the myth of the ”Gentleman Publisher” and the myth of the ”Literary Outsider”. The former is a personification of early twentieth century book-market honour codes. The latter is a version of the ”Romantic Genius”, which specifically pertains to a literary context. These two archetypes could be perceived as both unanimous and contradictory, since they traditionally represent different positions in the process of literary production. With respect to the image constructed of Bo Cavefors’s publishing, they seem to coexist in one and the same persona.