DOI: 10.1515/ejss-2026-2007 ISSN: 2191-9399

Realismusbrüche – Tove Janssons Roman Solstaden als Poetik des Alter(n)s

Patrick Ledderose
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Zusammenfassung

In contrast to her Moomin books, Tove Jansson’s novel Solstaden is situated in a specific place and time – St. Petersburg, Florida, in the 1970s – and addresses a widely debated social issue of the day: the treatment of the elderly. As I will demonstrate in this paper, however, this socially realistic framework is consistently disrupted by a range of personal and irrational narrative voices. I argue that this aesthetic ambiguity is not accidental but should instead be understood as a deliberate poetics of aging and old age, intricately woven into the text itself.

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