Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 24, Issue 3, 2019

‘Women bear the rhyme’

Prudens van Duyse (1804-1859) as mediator of female authors

The Flemish poet, Prudens van Duyse (1804-1859), was a leading literary figure in the first half of the nineteenth century. In addition to his work as a writer, he also acted as a cultural mediator and it is striking that, in his work, he paid exceptional attention to female authors. This article examines, on the one hand, the relationship between Van Duyse's formulated beliefs and norms about female authors; and on the other, his motives and intentions for bringing these authors so prominently into the spotlight. In addition, it reveals how he incorporated female authors into his romantic poetics and employed them in his cultural-nationalist program.

R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink’s travel letters, written during his ‘exile’, 1844-1851

In the years 1844-1851, during his journey along libraries and archives in Germany and Austria, the young scholar and later writer and archivist Bakhuizen van den Brink (1810-1865) wrote extensive love letters to Julie Simon, who he had left behind in Liège. Expressing the emotions aroused by his exile from the Netherlands and the separation from the young woman whose heart he desired to win, Bakhuizen resorted to themes that are recurrent in other literary genres such as the epic and the Bildungsroman. Understanding the letters as works of art, this article sets out to trace and analyze these intertextual references between the letters and the genres of the epic and the Bildungsroman. References to the latter come to light when comparing the love letters to the letters Bakhuizen van den Brink wrote to his learned Dutch friends. By disclosing this intertextual network and by relating the themes from the epic and Bildungsroman to the repertoire of the young, 19th-century Dutch scholar, this article holds an attempt to deconstruct these 19th-century love letters.

Border control in the Dutch literary field between the wars. The literary critic A.M. de Jong and Nieuwe Zakelijkheid

Powerful critics around the journal Forum (1932-1935) like Hendrik Marsman and Menno ter Braak branded authors of Nieuwe Zakelijkheid to be no more than reporters and imitating followers – as opposed to ‘real’ writers of literature. However, from a field theoretical perspective, what seems to be a critical judgment in a literary debate, on closer inspection turns out to be about delimitating the borders of the literary field against a young group of journalists trying to find their way into literature. Against this background the present article focuses on Forum-opponent A.M. de Jong and his use of Nieuwe Zakelijkheid, situated within the debate on the term and the concept in other art disciplines as painting or architecture. The article argues that De Jong’s concept of literature reveals more similarities with his assumed antagonists than current research claims.

A Scrapheap as Joint Enterprise: Intercultural Empathy in Tom Lanoye’s Het derde huwelijk

So far, within the field of Dutch studies few have employed empathy to study texts on contemporary multiculturalism. Studying empathy as a cognitive and an affective phenomenon, this article combines insights from cognitive, affective and postcolonial research to establish several guidelines on how empathy functions between novel characters in an intercultural context. Rather than focussing on the empathic relations between reader and text, the article investigates empathy between fictional characters. As an example, an analysis of Tom Lanoye’s novel Het derde huwelijk [The Third Marriage] is offered. The analysis concentrates on the way in which the narrative uses a highly prejudiced author as an indictment against the West’s emotional inability with regard to migrants.