Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2014

By Dutch literary scholars Willem Bilderdijk is often represented as an unhappy man with a miserable life, full of poverty, illness and underestimation. He is, indeed, famous for his endless complaining and his burning desire for death. There were good reasons for him to be unhappy: he was often ill, lived in exile, suffered the loss of children and had the constant feeling he couldn’t find his way in life. In spite Read More

Willem Frederik Hermans’s second collection of short stories, Paranoia (1953), opens with a short prose piece entitled ‘Preambule’ that for decades has been regarded as an introductory essay to the book. The italicized sentence ‘There is only one real word: chaos’ has often been understood as summary of the author’s own epistemological views. However, Hermans himself always insisted that ‘Preambule’ was a story; but the a Read More

This article aims to highlight the prominent place and role of the animal in the literary and visual work of the Dutch writer and artist Charlotte Mutsaers (1942-). The border-crossing between human and animal will be dealt with on the basis of the interaction between image and text in Mutsaers’s oeuvre. In this intermedial perspective, I first focus on three images of Mutsaers’s visual work exemplifying the human-anim Read More