The vanished land of childhood Autobiographical narration in Astrid Lindgren’s work

In her essays and speeches Astrid Lindgren stressed over and over again her special relationship to her own childhood. However, what constitutes this relationship and how it influenced Lindgren’s literary development and her self-image as an author has not been adequately investigated. Based on the recently developed concept of cultural memory as a new paradigm in the cultural and literary sciences and on recent cognitive studies in memory research, I would like to demonstrate that there exists an important connection between literature and memory in Lindgren’s literary work.