Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 17, Issue 3, 2012

In discussions on the social impact of literature, literary commitment is often opposed to literary autonomy. Within the field of Dutch literature, Willem Frederik Hermans is generally understood as one of the most important representatives and supporters of literary autonomy. Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, is generally considered as one of the world’s most famous representatives and supporters of committed liter Read More

Digital humanities’ is a discipline on the rise. But there still are a lot of prejudices to battle concerning the use of quantitative methods in literary analysis. This article presents an example of the way quantitative data can be used in a stylistic analysis. Our case study is the novel De asielzoeker by Arnon Grunberg. We relate Grunberg’s poetical standpoints on the nature and function of literature to his style of writing. Our article Read More

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 ‘go Read More

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 p Read More