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Kicking the hornet’s nest: The rhetoric of social campaigning in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has attracted huge audiences all over the world. Interest in the trilogy has been fuelled by revelations about the life and death of the author, and by clever publicity campaigns for both the books and the film adaptations, but little attention has been paid so far to the language and style of the novels. This article will focus on Larsson’s attempt to incorporate social campaigning and politics into the crime genre, and the extent to which he is able to combine rhetorical attacks on the injustices of contemporary Swedish society with a gripping plot. The article will offer a close analysis of the stylistic ‘gear shifts’ in the novels (Page, 1973), along with an examination of the various types of paratextual matter (Genette, 1997 [1987]) they incorporate. In addition, I will explore how far Larsson’s writing participates in the reworking of definitions of criminality and deviance within the genre (Gregoriou, 2007). Finally, the article will consider how far the film adaptations dilute Larsson’s social and political agenda, and tone down or glamorise the sexual violence which is such a feature of the novels.