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Abstract

Audio Fiction Making Noise: A Changing Genre in Children’s Literature
 This article is a study of contemporary audio fiction for children in Sweden, what is sometimes also called audio originals or born-audio books. Audio fiction is defined in the article as literature written to be recorded for audio and consumed through listening. It is a genre related to, and overlapping with, audiobooks, radio, and podcasts but obviously also with literature in printed books. While audio fiction has risen in production and popularity it is not a new phenomenon as such, but rather a kind of literature that has developed over time. The article gives historical examples of children’s audio fiction and situates the contemporary production in a larger context of a changing media world and the book market for children’s literature. The main examples used to understand the phenomenon are IJustWantToBeCool’s Sommarjobbarna (The Summer Workers, 2020­–2022) and Camilla Brinck’s series on the mice Musse & Helium (2017–). These are the most popular audiobooks for children in the last years and both series as well as authors are linked to other media such as Youtube, podcast, print, and music. The theoretical conjectures derive from book history and sociology of literature, arguing that changing media for literature has direct implications for literary form, function, and dissemination. Methodologically the article is a genre study using Alastair Fowler’s concept of genre as aggregated features. Thus, a comparison is made between the two examples and other formats such as children’s print books, audiobooks, and radio drama as well as literary genres such as adventure fiction, melodrama, and slapstick. Furthermore, narrative aspects of the two audio literature examples are analyzed in terms of metafiction, voice, and sound effects.