The Section for the Sociology of Literature

The Section for the Sociology of Literature was founded in 1965 by Lars Furuland (1928–2009). Together with Bo Bennich-Björkman (1926–2010) and a number of other people, Furuland built Uppsala’s Department of the Sociology of Literature into a broad research-focused instution that includes both analysis of literary works and studies of literature's external conditions.

The ambition has been to shed light on the entire literary process – the path and conditions of the literary work from author to reader, via publishers, critics, bookstores, libraries, schools. A large part of the research has also been devoted to forgotten and marginalized forms of literature, among them workers' literature, popular literature, children's and youth literature, emigrant literature and amateur literature.

Among the other areas of the sociology of literature are, for example, popular movements such as cultural environments, author identity and author livelihood, taste formation and the literary field, publishing statistics, publishing history, library history, historical and contemporary reader research, literary canon, the importance of computerization for literary culture. Read a more detailed presentation of the sociological perspective of literature and various research efforts based on it.