Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe: Exploring the Field

This book explores the aesthetic consequences of Protestantism in Scandinavia. Fourteen case studies from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century discuss five abstract and trans-historical principles that characterize Scandinavian aesthetics and that arguably derive from Protestant thinking and practice, namely: simplicity, logocentrism, tension between pronounced individualism and collectivism, relatedness to the world, and ethics. The contributions address the peculiar aesthetics of Scandinavian print, literature, architecture, film, and opera and reflect on the influence of Protestant traditions on the establishment of genres and writing practices. This volume is the first in a new series that will focus on the aesthetics of Protestantism in Scandinavia, both theoretically and through exemplary individual analyses.