Idyll och samhällsklass i Titta, Madicken, Det snöar! : Samspelet mellan bild och text i bilderboken

This thesis addresses a gap in research on the ideological dimensions of picture books by analysing Titta, Madicken, det snöar!, one of Astrid Lindgren’s more socially and ideologically conscious stories, raising questions about how these dimensions are expressed in a book for young children. The study explores how Ilon Wikland’s images interact with Lindgren’s text to convey and challenge notions of idyll, depict social class, and show the relationship between idyll and social class. Using the concept of iconotext as a theoretical framework, the analysis combines semiotic examination of images and text with contextualization in early 20th-century rural Sweden. Social class is understood through Pierre Bourdieu´s concept of habitus as a generative system of durable dispositions that shape socially recognizable practices, tastes, and forms of behavior, through which individuals both enact and perceive classed positions within the social space. Maria Nikolajeva’s methodological insights on picture books provided a structured approach for examining environment, character, narrative perspective, time, movement, causality, and mimesis, without imposing a rigid sequence. The results show that idyll, in this book, is constructed through the interaction of setting and characters’ emotional states, and that it is dependent on stability, care, and adult responsibility, which in turn correlate with higher social class. Social differences are communicated through material culture, behavior, and interactions, with safety and trust contingent on the adults surrounding the child. In this context and in this book, idyll can be understood as dependent on security and stability, which in turn is closely linked to and considered contingent upon higher social class.