Answering the Call. Vocation and Responsibility in Scandinavian Cultures since 1750

Pehr Englén, Emmanuel Reymond (eds). Brepols 2026

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 theeighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Ewald and Ibsento Stangerup and Teller, from Nexø and Wägner to Ørstavikand Wærness, the eleven chapters shows how vocation is actuallya multi-faceted concept. Different contexts and time periodshave made sense of the responsibility a call entails in different,sometimes, opposing ways. The contributors trace the tensionsbequeathed by the difference between Luther’s ‘original’ calland Pietism’s internalized one, between the needs of the neighbourand the pangs of conscience, between a duty to others and a yearningto fulfilling one’s own potential. They explore how vocation,as a literary-intellectual resource given by tradition, has been usedto contest broader collective frameworks ofmeaning even after it lost any transcendental reference.As such this volume offers a literary history seen fromthe post-secular perspective of the call.

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Table of content

Pehr Englén (University of Freiburg) and Emmanuel Reymond (University of Strasbourg) – Introduction: The Vocational Imperative

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

Martin Humpál (Charles University in Prague) – A Pastor without a Calling: Hanne Ørstavik’s Novel Presten

Rodrigo Edvard Araujo Silva (University of Strasbourg) – 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 (University of Southern Denmark) – Revivalism and Vocation in Martin Andersen Nexø’s Pelle Erobreren

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

Dörte Linke (Humboldt University in Berlin) – Being of Benefit to the World: Vocation in the Correspondence of Emilia Fogelklou and Elin Wägner

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

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

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

Sarah Fengler (University of Oxford) – ‘Det væsentligste Indhold af mine Arbeider’: Johannes Ewald and Protestant Aesthetics

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