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Copyright of Nederlandse Letterkunde is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nederlandse Letterkunde is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper compares two Marxist biographical monographs on Dutch 19th century writer Multatuli, by J. Saks and F.W. Driessen, and interprets the differences between their respective approaches in relation to conflicting tendencies within Marxism. Whereas the former adheres to an objectivist (or determinist) strand in Marxist cultural analysis, the latter implicitly relies on a Lukácsian conception of realism and a subjectivist plea for political commitment. In examining these studies and comparing them to Dik van der Meulen's authoritative biography of Multatuli this article aims to reflect on both Multatuli's afterlife in the Dutch socialist movement and the relationship between Marxist literary analysis and the biographical approach to literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I want to present an approach to read complex novels: genrereading. Adopting this new approach, a genre and its conventions are used as a frame in order to guide the reader's interpretation process. This procedure is illustrated with the example of the Dutch novel The Blessed Ones (De gelukzaligen) by Willem Brakman (1997), which is read from the perspective of the genre conventions of the 18th-century imaginary travel story. To conclude the article, the proposed reading process is generalized by using a different genre (the naturalist novel) as a frame to analyze Brakman's novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nederlandse Letterkunde is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nederlandse Letterkunde is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

At the publication of his Homer parody, Londinias, in 1873, Vosmaer proposed – not without irony – that the future researcher ought to try an euhemeristic interpretation of his poem. In the present paper we accept his challenge. Using three different modern literary approaches we try answering a research question that may be derived from euhemerism: what is the relationship between reality and mythology in Londinias? We describe the visit to the British Museum of the three heroes of the poem, ancient Greeks transformed into 19th-century Dutchmen, as a type of reenactment of the past. Using the notion of performativity we compare the aesthetics and life vision of the Ancient World, as represented in the Elgin Marbles, to the contemporary reality of London, a city that has transcended mankind. Next, we examine the city experience of the three Greek Dutchmen in a section designated urban anxiety, because that aptly describes the impression that London leaves with them. We conclude our study with an examination of the space descriptions in Londinias with the aid of Bakhtin's chronotope concept, in order to determine the genre the poem belongs to, according to the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the eighteenth century, Western society and culture underwent a radical change, and, as Reinhart Koselleck argued, so did the meanings of political and ideological concepts. More recently, theorists such as François Hartog have linked this shift to a changing attitude towards the past, or the regime of historicity: from a continuity between past and present (ancien regime) to a discontinuity, a break between past and present (modern regime). Historians Peter Fritzsche and Frank Ankersmit have (independently) linked the historical experience of this break to paradoxical feelings of longing for something that has been irretrievably lost (melancholy, nostalgia, the sublime). In this paper, I will suggest that the close reading method of Begriffsgeschichte can contribute to an understanding of how this shift from the ancien regime to a modern regime is, in itself, full of paradoxes: the regimes as such were not monolithic constructs, and the meanings of the concepts that they claimed to explain were not unambiguous. To illustrate this point with a case study, I will analyse the concept of ‘patriotism' in the correspondence between Dutch poets Willem Bilderdijk and Rhynvis Feith following Bilderdijk's revised edition of Onno Zwier van Haren's epic De Geusen (1785), and in a play written by Feith in that same year. At that specific moment, the term ‘patriotic' not only referred to love for one’s country, but also to a specific political faction, of which Feith was a member but which Bilderdijk ardently opposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares representations of the life and death of Saint Ursula, who was mortyred in Cologne, in texts by two seventeenth-century Amsterdam intellectuals. In 1639, the famous playwright Joost van den Vondel staged the martyred saint as a young and courageous heroine in his tragedy Maeghden. We contrast this with a radically different picture of the saint which arises from newly found sources from the same time and place. In 1633, Father Leonardus Marius of the Amsterdam béguinage recounted Saint Ursula’s life in a few of his hagiographic sermons. Since Marius was probably instrumental in Vondel's conversion to Catholicism, it is reasonable to assume that Vondel was familiar with Marius's views on Saint Ursula. Due to their conflicting ideologies, however, Marius and Vondel depict her in completely different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poet P.C. Boutens was much interested in the poems and artworks of the English Pre-Raphaelite painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He bought and read Rossetti's books, translated Rossetti's poetry, and alluded to Rossetti's artworks in his own poetry. In the ‘Sonnet / aan D.G. Rossetti', Boutens refers to Rossetti's portrait studies of Jane Morris. This paper explores the function of the reference to Rossetti's visual artworks in this poem, and indicates how Boutens' ‘picture-sonnet' can be related to international tendencies in the genre of ekphrasis (or ‘Bildgedichten') around 1900, and to Rossetti's double works of art in particular. I will show that Boutens placed himself in Rossetti's tradition with his poem to D.G. Rossetti by choosing the sonnet form, by articulating the attempt to get a glimpse of an eternal soul through the visual representation of a face, and by putting this momentary experience into a permanent, symbolist language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception of texts as being postmodern fiction can lead to a somewhat reductive and defensive reading of those texts. Especially with an eye on intertextual relations, the theoretical postmodern or deconstructive approaches seem to be the only acceptable instrument to understand the complex dynamics of the texts. As a following, the attention is drawn exclusively on the particularly dominant aspects of self-reflexivity. In this paper, I address the limitations of such a view and I present an alternative biased reading which focuses on the affirmative relations between text and intertexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nederlandse Letterkunde is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Though claims of a crisis in Dutch literary studies are in the air, the diagnosis is far from clear. Against this background, the article argues that first of all, systematic research into the practices and dynamics of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination in literary studies from a historical perspective is needed. As a step into this direction the article undertakes a case study of the explicit motivations of research on textual transformations in the Netherlands of the last 40 years. The findings are placed into the context of what seem to be general tendencies of the discipline over the last decades, touching among other things upon general discussions of quality standards in the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Songs aimed at the Dutch youth became a booming business in the Dutch Republic. In contemporary Western culture, such popular songs constitute an important vehicle for expressing youth identities. With regard to the Low Countries, it is this article’s hypothesis that in the booming business of songs composed by and for youngsters - loosely defined here as ‘unmarried young people’ - early stages of these modern processes of identity formation are visible. By exploring this vast and unique corpus and its functionality in the context of the NWO research project ‘Dutch Songs On Line’, this article aims to contribute to the international debate on youth identities, more specifically to the much debated question when ‘adolescence’ as a category was discovered: in the 19th century, or in the early modern era? Building on several trends in the existing literature the first part of this article will offer a framework for the analysis of the identity formation function of the songs for the early modern Dutch youth. The second part is dedicated to a case study: focusing on songs about and for students the potential of this type of research is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the literary non-fiction of Bart van Loo, especially his trilogy of books devoted to French literature and culture, De Frankrijktrilogie (2011). Developing Jim Collins's penetrating account of ‘popular literary culture’ and of the ways in which literary classics are nowadays converted into entertaining ‘good reads', the article argues that the literary tradition currently functions as a guide to the ‘good life’. Crucial here, as a comparison with Geerten Meijsing's similar use of the Italian cultural heritage demonstrates, is the opposition between tasteless consumerism and an alternative, ‘literary' form of lifestyle, which weds elegant literature to tasteful forms of fashion, tourism and gastronomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1923 a few leading Dutch writers took the initiative of founding a dining club, a private society of kindred spirits and their guests who regularly dine together and discuss their shared interests. The model for this Letterkundige Kring (Literary Circle) was the PEN Club in London, established two years previously, which was an association of Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors and Novelists that endeavoured to set up a branch in every country in the world. To this end, the leaders of the London establishment - the chairman John Galsworthy and the founder Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, helped by her daughter Marjorie Watts - had approached several well-known literary figures in the Netherlands. Anyone who became a member of one PEN centre was automatically welcome in all the others. As one of the national PEN centres - by 1930 there were already 46, with a total of about 3000 members - this new Literary Circle endorsed the internationalist and pacifist thinking of the international PEN club: by offering hospitality to writers from all countries and actively bringing them together, the peoples they represented would by degrees be reconciled and even ultimately bring world peace within reach. This signified that the PEN club had an idealistic and, involuntarily, also a political agenda, even though it considered itself to be emphatically a-political. This article describes how The Literary Circle fared in its early years as the PEN Centre and analyses the role it played in the literary and cultural life of the Netherlands in the 1920s. The archives covering the early years of this Dutch section have largely been lost, but it has turned out to be possible to get a picture of that period on the basis of scattered archive items and reports in the press of the time. Like its mother organisation, the Dutch PEN centre was a fairly informal enterprise that was able to steer an independent course. It was from the very beginning headed by the poet P.C. Boutens. He was also the chairman of the Vereeniging van Letterkundigen (Literary Association) (1905), which concentrated mainly on protecting the material interests of writers. There was nonetheless never any cooperation between the two organisations. They were also very different in nature. Whereas the Vereeniging van Letterkundigen relied on the largest possible membership, De Letterkundige Kring deliberately limited the number of members. All that can be established is that 94 authors, many of them living in Amsterdam or The Hague, were members for varying periods in the early years. It was quite a select company, usually of older male literary figures, which one could only join by invitation. It was however possible for outsiders to more or less follow the comings and goings of both the Dutch section and those abroad in the national daily and weekly press, with which several members of the Kring were associated. One of the most important activities of the Dutch centre was the members' dinners, to which they invited guests, the most famous of whom were Thomas Mann (in 1924) and Georges Duhamel (in 1926), both of whom were touring several PEN centres. By the same token, three prominent and active PEN members from the Netherlands - P.C. Boutens, Herman Robbers and Jo van Ammers-Küller - were received as guests of honour at distinguished PEN gatherings abroad. From 1925, Dutch writers were also able to extend their international network at the annual PEN congress, even though at that time they were still not playing any conspicuous part, either in numbers or contributions. A large part of these congresses was in fact devoted to entertainment, though serious issues were also dealt with. A lot of attention was naturally paid to the writer's pacifist and internationalist task, but also to the intellectual and material circumstances under which he was best able to fulfil this task, such as copyright, freedom of expression and the interests of the translator. In the first few years social intercourse was the main business of the Dutch branch too. Its exclusiveness made it a somewhat inward-looking company, where young talent remained in the minority. Partly as a result of this, the dynamism of the club could have been greater, and this was not good for its reputation. But paradoxically enough, its internationalism meant that it did at the same time look outwards, which is one of the major reasons why it must have been attractive to many Dutch writers. In this way De Letterkundige Kring made an essential contribution to the internationalisation of literary life in the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on prevailing views on literary internationalism and the way it was institutionally organised and developed in the Belgian PEN Club. The organisation of the Belgian PEN and the way internationalism was set up there cannot be discussed independently of developments in the rest of the international intellectual field. It was an ‘entangled history'. I have limited myself to a comparison with other countries and literatures where it was hard to implement the original PEN model with a single coordinating branch for each nation state. What arguments were used to mark off autonomous entities from each other in an international intellectual world that became increasingly institutionalised between the wars? The Belgian case was interesting when it came to answering these questions. It was only in 1930 (formally in 1931), after lengthy discussions reflecting on these issues, that the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking authors in Belgium went their separate ways. In an article he wrote about the PEN Club in L'Europe in 1926, Stefan Zweig offered an interesting analysis of the difference between internationalism and cosmopolitanism. In Zweig's opinion, the aims might have been more focused. The members of the club did well to opt decisively for genuine internationalism: ‘ce qu’il nous faut, c'est un internationalisme sincère, prêt à yous les sacrifices, une fidelité durable et indissoluble à la seule veritable patrie, qui est pour nous la communauté de l'esprit européen'. Has the PEN Club ever come anywhere near the ideal that Zweig outlined, the achievement of a sincere internationalism loyal to only one native land, ‘la communauté de l'esprit européen'? In fact to a certain extent it has, in that it was initially a chiefly European affair, but in other respects it has not at all. Previous research has already pointed out that, in spite of the noble aspirations of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and the related International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, it has never been possible to become detached from the power politics of governments and from affinities with such categories as race, nation, religion, class and so on. In addition, it was all too easily assumed that resourceful institutions with complex information networks and equally complex decision-making processes would smooth away any differences. Another of the principles of the PEN Club was to encourage intellectual cooperation and in this way it expressed the cultural internationalism that first saw the light in the shadow of the First World War. Such equally ingenious constructions as the voting procedures used in the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation regulated the balance between the large and small PEN centres with their proportional expectations. There are nevertheless also major differences between the PEN Club and the ICIC. In the first place there were few indications of direct political involvement in PEN by the great powers (the symbolic significance of PEN was too small to warrant it). Another difference is that in the view of the protagonists in PEN the cultural world order was not defined by a dialogue between major ‘civilisations'. There was little or no talk in the PEN Club of any ambition to mediate between civilisations. The literary world order was defined by dialogue between autonomous literatures. The basic entities involved in the organisation of literary internationalism were literatures and cities. These were supplemented by such additional entities as (native) countries, nations, world empires and regions, but the basic foundations consisted of a metropolitan literary culture. The world's literary system is more complex than any economic world system with its clearly identifiable dominant centre and peripheral (or semi-peripheral) areas. The PEN Club does not fit into a model that takes Paris as its absolute centre. Between the wars, Paris was at most just one of several centres. If we nonetheless persist with the centre-periphery model, the PEN Club symbolises the loss of the French centralist model of culture that applied to the old nation states of the nineteenth century. The PEN never clearly defined what autonomous literatures were, though the Belgians (and others), with August Vermeylen at the forefront, requested a vague definition. What we see here at a macro level are the same mechanisms as those for determining who could be recognised as a ‘real' writer: everything occurred in the form of co-option. ‘Real' writers determine who the other ‘real' writers are by means of all sorts of mechanisms and media for consecration. Representatives of ‘autonomous' literatures within PEN determined what the other autonomous literatures were. In accordance with this organic process, the regulations under which it was hoped to organise literary internationalism were repeatedly discussed in the course of the 1920s. It was not until the congresses in The Hague and Amsterdam in 1931 that consensus was reached. The unitary Belgian branch of the PEN Club ceased to exist at the end of the 1930s too, at the same time as the end of the discussions on the organisation of the international club. The broad, interwoven view of the Belgian PEN Club demonstrates that the Belgian compromise, with alternating chairmanship and peaceful coexistence, can also be seen as a choice made out of sheer necessity, determined in part by centrifugal literary forces in other countries. The French-speaking Belgians were especially uncomfortable with the self-confident Flemish writers in their ranks. There was never any doubt about the autonomy of French and Dutch literature in the international PEN Club. But Belgium was by no means the only country where it was hard to implement the original PEN model with its single coordinating branch in each nation state. The organisation of a Yiddish PEN (a literature without territory) saw to it that for a long time two separate branches were not tolerated in a single city. This was compounded by the fact that the problems with national and regional attachment and the urge for independence always manifested themselves together with and building on other fault lines, including those between generations and political persuasions. This was the case in Germany even before the breakthrough of fascism. It was not easy to organise literary internationalism, let alone define it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1860, Blommaert edited a manuscript fragment, found in the municipal archives of Bourbourg. The fragment offers a unique text witness of a Middle Dutch Carolingian epic, nowadays known as the Fierabras. Just before the fragment breaks off, the text discusses the shield (escutcheon) of the epical heroes Roland and his father Milon, bearing a red lion rampant on a field of gold. In 1937, Knuttel recognized in this heraldic detail an unambiguous allusion to the arms of the counts of Holland. Ever since, researchers believe the Bourbourg-text to have been written for the court of Holland, being one of the sparse testimonies of the interest the Dutch nobility in the north took in patronizing Middle Dutch chivalric literature. Our investigations, however, seem to counter this view. Members of the House of Gavere, in the south of Flanders, took on a variant of Roland's shield by the end of the thirteenth century, claiming descendance from a comrade-in-arms of the epic hero. This legend took root in southern Flemish manuscript illumination around 1300. It will be demonstrated that southern Flanders - the region around Gavere - is an equally likely context for the composition of the Bourbourg-text, offering a much more plausible explanation for the southern Flemish dialect of its poet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publishers are often compared to gatekeepers both on account of the role they play in the selection process as on account of their vital contribution to the social recognition of authorship. The comparison signals an important phenomenon but has its limitations. The first is of a historical nature. For centuries the printing culture coexisted with the much older manuscript culture. Publishers only started to play a key role between authors and the market at the moment when in the 18th and 19th century a print society originated. The second limitation concerns the distinction between literary genres. Those who call publishers gatekeepers suggest that they do so all across the board. That this is incorrect appears from an investigation into the publication of poetry and plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution I examine how Flemish nineteenth-century men of letters, and more specifically: historical novelists, presented themselves on the first textual ‘thresholds' that readers encounter when they open a book, namely the title page and the dedication. These peritexts not only show how the novelists presented themselves to the outside world, i.e., the profile they wanted to create for themselves; they also provide insights into the social status and economic situation of the men of letters, since underlying motives frequently played a significant role in this respect. Moreover, an analysis of the aspect of self-presentation yields interesting data concerning the process by which the literary field became autonomous with respect to the field of the power. The results of this analysis, which takes the authors' self-presentation to the reading public as its central perspective, corroborate the existing view that the literary field in Flanders only started to become autonomous with the Van Nu en Straks-movement. During the period between the 1830s and the 1880s, the relationship between authors on the one hand and political, social and ecclesiastical powers on the other was such that artistic freedom and autonomy were luxuries a Flemish author could hardly afford. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the recent surge of encyclopaedic historical novels in Dutch literature. A first characteristic of these novels is that they install an identification between the I-narrator and the history he or she narrates. This identification does not take on the traditional form of the typical character embodying the historical average, nor that of the hopeful Michelet-like historian who acts as a prophet for his people. Rather, the I-figure is linked with history because they both follow the same exceptional, a-typical and apocalyptic logic, exemplified in viruses or nuclear fission. A second characteristic of these novels concerns the alterity and multiplicity of the I-character and history. Identity is revealed as a set of historical stories that penetrate one another. History turns out to be a multilayered image of various periods interpenetrating each other. On this basis, the article proposes a typology of historical novels based on the amount of historical layers: the one-dimensional novel corresponds with Ankersmit's objective historical experience (the past is experienced as past); the two-dimensional novel corresponds with his subjective historical experience (the past is experienced from the viewpoint of the present); and the three-dimensional novels discussed in the article correspond with Ankersmit's sublime historical experience (the distinction between the past and the present is erased). This leads to a short discussion of the ‘historicity regime’ (Francis Hartog) involved in the sublime historical novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Een nieuw vaderland voor de muzen by Karel Porteman en Mieke Smits Veldtcan be read as an invitation to browse freely through the Dutch literature of the seventeenth century. The twenty-first century differs fundamentally from the seventeenth century, but the multimediality and hypertextuality of the periods are strikingly similar. Seventeenth-century emblems from the Southern Netherlands were read in non-lineary, fragmentary ways. Our changing world inspires us to re-evaluate this aspect of Renaissance literature and to read recent scholarly works in the same creative way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]