Apathy in Scandinavian Literature: The Paradoxical Power of Disengagement

Apathy, understood as disengagement in terms of emotions and actions, is a common reaction to crises, and knowledge of the notion’s conceptual development provides essential insight into the measures we might take in situations in which we face problems we have not had to deal with before. Based on the thesis that literature, understood as an extensive archive of emotions, provides a privileged source for the study of them, Apathy in Scandinavian Literature investi-gates the variety of forms that apathy takes in Scandinavian literature from the Renaissance onwards, including the paradoxical form of ‘engaged disengagement’. The volume opens with a study of nodal points in the conceptual history of apathy in philosophy, Christian theology, psychiatry, political science and cultural studies that spans 2,500 years in Western intellectual history. This study, that provides a hitherto unseen comprehensive introduction to the notion of apathy, forms the basis for analyses of Scandinavian literature from three periods: Renaissance and Enlightenment literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, decadent literature from the decades around 1900, and contemporary literature. Via these analyses, the volume identifies five distanct formulations of apathy, ranging from a display of endurance, via a state of resignation and an act of renunciation, to a soically produced condition and a form of resi-stance. Situated in the theoretical landscape of affect studies and the history of emotions, Apathy in Scandinavian Literature demonstrates the relevance of apathy for the study of literary texts concerned with passion and reason, decadence, the welfare state and ecological anxiety.