”En obotlig surgurka”

Theme: Children's Literature Reviews - How, Where and Who? Ill. Jenny Nyström from Barnkammarens bok, 1882. ”An incurable grouch”: The Critical Assessment of Humour in Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Books in Sweden and Norway Astrid Lindgren’s books about Pippi Longstocking were immediately successful in Sweden and Norway. At the same time, they caused a moral panic among some Swedish literary critics. In this article, I examine the Pippi trilogy’s reception in Sweden and Norway from a new perspective. Firstly, I provide an overview of the reception of the first three Pippi books (published in 1945, 1946, and 1948) in Swedish and Norwegian newspapers to uncover and compare national trends. Secondly, I discuss the reviewers’ assessments of the books’ humour. Research on both literary humour and literary criticism have experienced a resurgence in recent years. Still, the assessment of humour in literary reviews and the particular challenges of reviewing children’s literature need further exploration. Through a humour-theoretical analysis, I discuss how Lindgren’s first critics understood humour and the role humour played as a literary critical criterion. The examination reveals that the humour was seen as a central criterion by both Swedish and Norwegian critics. However, the Swedish reception, while more professional, was more often marked by moral and aesthetic reservations regarding the critics’ understanding of the humour. In the reviews I study, the humour was mainly paraphrased and demonstrated, rather than discussed and analysed. But in a small selection of observations and literary comparisons, we may find entry points to a deeper understanding of why Pippi is so funny.