Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2017

‘Nach dem Holländischen Jost van Vondels’. The seventeenth-century Maria Stuart-translation from the Saxion lawyer Christoph Kormart

Literary translations had an important role in the circulation of political ideas in Early Modern Europe. This article shows how the Saxon lawyer Christoph Kormart used Vondel’s martyr play Maria Stuart (1646) as a political instrument. In Saxony, elector Johann Georg II was not a sovereign ruler, but was politically dependent on the nobility and partially his brothers. Adding different political and baroque themes to the Vondel play, Kormart used the German translation (1672) to criticize this political constellation and warned against the dangers of a system with oligarchic tendencies.

A Dutch Calvinist in the United States: Postsecular Critique in The Blood of the Lamb (1961) by Peter de Vries

With The Blood of the Lamb, Peter de Vries has written a novel that can be qualified as a typical Dutch novel about secularization; but the novel is not Dutch. The Blood of the Lamb is written by an American author of Dutch descent. In this article, Lameijer and Ieven argue that De Vries’s way of dealing with religion can be understood as typical of how Dutch culture in the 20th century dealt with the secularisation of society. Reading The Blood of the Lamb from a contemporary, post-secular perspective, Ieven and Lameijer demonstrate how Peter de Vries’s novel can be taken as the starting point for a reflection on Dutch patterns of religion and secular critique.

(Un)conventional reading. Old genres, new novels, timeless frames

In this paper, I want to present an approach to read complex novels: genre-reading. 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.