Crossing the magical barriers of art : Social class, authorship and capital in the contemporary Finnish literary field

Abstract

This article examines how social class origin is experienced to affect the trajectories of becoming and being an author in the context of the contemporary Finnish literary field. It analyzes authors’ experiences of social class, artistic work and authorship in a theoretical framework that draws from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Beverley Skeggs, particularly the concepts of economic and cultural capital, habitus and inscription. Social class origin is argued to be a relevant factor that affects the ways authorship is pursued even in a country, such as Finland, where artistic labor is relatively well supported by the public sector. The results show that authors from upper middle-class, academic middle-class and cultural families generally felt themselves safe to pursue the risky profession of authorship. Authors from lower middle-class and working-class origins often experienced feelings of outsiderness and not-belonging, as their personal habitus was considered to be “out of sync” with the literary field. The empirical research material of this article consists of authors’ written experiences of artistic work, social class and gender. The data were collected in 2018 and analyzed using qualitative content analysis.