Luokan varjoista : kirjailijuuden, tekijyyden ja yhteiskuntaluokan jäsennyksiä 2010-luvun kotimaisen kirjallisuuden kentällä

This article-based dissertation explores the work of contemporary Finnish liter-ary authors from the viewpoint of social class. In the study, I ask how social class is experienced to affect being and becoming an author in the Finnish liter-ary field, how authors identify with the concept of social class, and how these connections between class and artistic labour should be approached. The theo-retical framework of the study draws elements from the class analysis of Pierre Bourdieu and Beverley Skeggs. Social class is approached as a structure creat-ed in the interplay of different forms of capital – economic, cultural, social and symbolic – from which the focus is on economic and cultural capital. In the framework, special emphasis is given to the role of lived experience. In addi-tion, the research is contextualized with theories of authorship. The data consists of 47 written responses collected from authors via an open call. In the data collection, the responding authors were asked to reflect on their experiences of class and authorship. The data is subjected to qualita-tive content analysis. The results show that authors experience, understand, and analyse class, and therefore make it visible, in relation to economic and cultural capital, even when they consider class as an identity or a societal struc-ture to be distant or otherwise difficult to grasp. The analysis shows that class background affects authors’ feelings of entitlement and belonging to the literary community. Authors experienced that forms of economic capital, including economic safety nets, affect their ability to navigate the precarious conditions in artistic and literary fields. The research also shows that authors’ (dis)identification with social classes is complex. Even if authors understood class as a relevant social category they often found it difficult to locate them-selves within it, and the process included a lot of reflection and negotiation. This was often because of intrinsically conflicting positions and capitals: the combination of high levels of cultural and limited economic capital, or a con-flict between class origin and current status. Due to these conflicting positions, the concept of capital can be considered useful when handling the functioning of class in the field of literature.