A flagrant lack of common decency or literary truth? Authorial ethos in Katarina Frostenson’s later works

This article examines authorial ethos in Swedish poet Katarina Frostenson’s literary response to the crisis in the Swedish Academy 2017–2018, marked by allegations of misconduct and by institutional upheaval. Through a textual analysis of Frostenson’s quartet K (2019), F – en färd (2020, “F – a journey”), A. Andra tankar (2021, “A. Other thoughts”), and Alma (2023), the article traces how these works constitute a literary scandal in its own right through their presentation of a counternarrative. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field and Liesbeth Korthals Altes’ work on ethos, the analysis demonstrates how Frostenson’s established cultural capital becomes both a resource and a liability. The article identifies three key narrative strategies: discursive reframing, extensive intertextuality that reinforces symbolic capital, and oblique invocations of political persecution. These strategies reveal the tension between Frostenson’s prior literary authority and the ethos-building in the works at hand. The Swedish Academy’s traditional role as cultural arbiter becomes a site of disruption of Frostenson’s authorial ethos.