Monica Borg – författare

Johan Ahlbäck var valsverksarbetaren från Smedjebacken som lyckades förverkliga sin dröm om att bli konstnär och i bild skildra de levnads- och arbetsvillkor som gällde under hans liv. Hans konstnärskap ger oss unika bilder inifrån industrivärlden som få har skildrat tidigare. Efter femton års slit i valsverket kunde Johan känna i sin kropp hur musklerna spändes och kunde som ingen annan fånga rörelserna i det kollektiva arbetet i järnverk och verkstäder. Hans bilder berättar om industriarbetarnas slitsamma kroppsarbete men även om det tunga arbetet med kolmilorna i skogen. Genom hans bilder får vi en inblick i det Sverige som en gång var och om de arbetsmiljöer som rådde i Bergslagen under 1900-talets första hälft.

Ernest Christopher Dowson (1867-1900) is best known as a the author of a number of exquisite lyrics which epitomise the mood and style of the English 1890s - verses like ''cynara'' and ''They are not long''. Yet Arthur Symons was only repeating what Dowson often himself asserted when he said that ''Dowson was the only poet I ever knew who cared more for his prose than his verse''.Monica Borg''s Introduction suggests for the first time what lay behind Dowson''s opinion of the importance of his prose, seeing withing it a programme of aesthetic and cultural radicalism. She places him firmly in relation to the late-nineteenth-century crisis of values, self and representation which Dowson both expressed and sought to precipitate, and she indicates that it is in his stories rather than his verse that Dowson shows how deeply implicated he was in the politics of resistance and cultural change that characterized the decadent literary and artistic movement. This edition provides texts of all of Dowson''s short stories, thoroughly corrected from the original editions and with detailed notes on their genesis and development.