Existentialism Retold: Women and Existential Philosophy of Religion in Nineteenth Century Scandinavia

The project will address a significant gap in nineteenth-century Scandinavian intellectual history by exploring for the first time the connection between two influential moments: an existential movement in Scandinavian philosophy of religion and the first women’s movements. Even though many key women writers and reformers were early readers of existential philosophy of religion, like that of Søren Kierkegaard, no study has reconstructed this relation. This oversight reflects historical and conceptual challenges in existential thought and methodological challenges in the recovery of women’s contributions to historical canons. REEXIST confronts these challenges through an interdisciplinary research design with analytical tools from intellectual history, existential philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy and theology, and literary theory. I will first conduct a detailed source-historical study to outline a Scandinavian existential movement and its network. This will lay the ground for characterising women’s contributions to existential thought by reading a diversity of texts— from literature, biography, letters to explicitly political, proto-feminist tracts—through existential-phenomenological hermeneutics, narrative analysis, and thematic-conceptual comparative study. These analyses will demonstrate how existential thought informed women’s activist writings as well as how women contributed to existential philosophy and theology. The project will thus break new ground through systematic exploration identifying novel, overlooked sources in existential thought and showing how women’s writings can be considered existential philosophy. This enables REEXIST to reassess entrenched, paradigmatic narratives in the history of existentialism and its role in nineteenth century Scandinavian thought, culture, religion and society, and present new methodological considerations in the ongoing work of recovering women’s contributions in reflective disciplines.