Pehr Englén & Emmanuel Reymond (dir.), Answering the Call. Vocation and Responsibility in Scandinavian Cultures since 1750

A wide-ranging survey of vocation in Scandinavian literature from the 18th to the 21st centuries.

Ever since Max Weber’s popularized the idea of a ‘Protestant ethics’, a close association of vocation with work has been considered a marker of Protestant cultures. In Scandinavia, it has even been mobilized to explain the countries’ industrial prowess and postwar prosperity. This volume complicates such assumptions.

With case studies drawing on Scandinavian literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Ewald and Ibsen to Stangerup and Teller, from Nexø and Wägner to Ørstavik and Wærness, the eleven chapters show how vocation is actually a multi-faceted concept. Different contexts and time periods have made sense of the responsibility a call entails in different, sometimes, opposing ways. The contributors trace the tensions bequeathed by the difference between Luther’s ‘original’ call and Pietism’s internalized one, between the needs of the neighbour and the pangs of conscience, between a duty to others and a yearning to fulfilling one’s own potential. They explore how vocation, as a literary-intellectual resource given by tradition, has been used to contest broader collective frameworks of meaning even after it lost any transcendental reference. As such this volume offers a literary history seen from the post-secular perspective of the call.

Table of Contents

Pehr Englén and Emmanuel Reymond  – Introduction: The Vocational Imperative

Joachim Schiedermair – ‘On Human Responsibility’: A Narratology of Secular Vocation in Henrik Ibsen’s Lille Eyolf (1894)

Martin Humpál – A Pastor without a Calling: Hanne Ørstavik’s Novel Presten

Rodrigo Edvard Araujo Silva – Early Swedish Working-class Literature and Social Democratic Lutheranism: Work, Class Engagement, and Solidarity as a Common Vocation in Maria Sandel’s Virveln

Søren Blak Hjortshøj – Revivalism and Vocation in Martin Andersen Nexø’s Pelle Erobreren

Giovanni Za – The Peaceful Development: The Mythologization of folkhemmet in Per Anders Fogelström’s Stad-serien

Dörte Linke – Being of Benefit to the World: Vocation in the Correspondence of Emilia Fogelklou and Elin Wägner

Pehr Englén – Vocation as Site of Conceptual Contention in Post-war Sweden: Wijkmark’s Engagement with Wingren’s Legacy

Gábor Attila Csúr – ‘Mange er kaldede, få er udvalgte’: Secular Practices of Religious Vocation in Henrik Stangerup’s Brother Jacob (1991)

Sotirios K. Mouzakis – ‘Vi skulle blive til noget’: The Meaning of Sacrifice and the Sacrifice of Meaning in Janne Teller’s Intet (2000)

Sarah Fengler – ‘Det væsentligste Indhold af mine Arbeider’: Johannes Ewald and Protestant Aesthetics

Emmanuel Reymond – The Voices of the Call: Different Dynamics of Vocation in Gunnar Wærness’s Ta på Jesus