Answering the Call: Vocation and Responsibility in Scandinavian Cultures Since 1750

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 shows 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.