Litteratur för integration av arbetarbarn

Idealism, individualism och nationalism i socialdemokratiska Solstrålen 1906–1909

Abstract

Tales for the Integration of Working-Class Children: Idealism, Individualism and Nationalism in the Social Democratic “The Sunbeam” 1906–1909.

In the early twentieth century, the Swedish Social Democratic Youth Movement was possessed of a strong faith in the ability of literature to transform individuals and society as a whole. This article explores such idealistic faith in cultural education as it pertains to an organization for children called the “Story Time” movement. The purpose of the movement was both cultural and political. By allowing working class children to enjoy literature in the form of stories and poems, the organization aimed to integrate underprivileged children into bourgeois culture and society. The organization’s magazine “The Sunbeam” (Solstrålen) was an important tool in this endeavor. This article analyzes the magazine’s publication of children’s literature between 1906 and 1909. The analysis reveals how reformist Social Democratic ideology pervades the literature that the children were served: individualism, grass-roots nationalism, and the vision of the Social Democratic consensus society were recurrent themes in the stories and poems. This ideology is revealed when the stories and poems are related to both the Marxist ideological basis with which Social Democracy was reconsidered in the late 1800’s, and to the communist movement in Sweden that followed in the tracks of the 1917 Russian revolution and the 1919 Third International (Comintern).