Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 26, Issue 2-3, 2021

In this article, we place the celebrating journal Nederlandse letterkunde in the historical context of the discipline of Dutch language & literature since the 1990s in the Netherlands. Special attention is paid to the school subject of Dutch, and to the teaching of literature within that subject. We show what developments have led to the current cooperation between academics in Dutch language & literature and didactic experts, who share a concern for the school subject. We conclude with three recommendations for the future of the journal.

This article discusses the history and relevance of ‘Periodiek’, a section of Nederlandse letterkunde in which two editors would briefly present the articles that were published in other journals on Dutch literature. The section ran from 1996 to 2003. First, this section is compared to overviews of recent publications in other journals; then, the nature and content of ‘Periodiek’ is discussed; and the article concludes with an exploration of what might have caused the end of this section: the improved search methods and access to articles online, or rather the transformations in the widening field of Dutch (literature) studies itself, making it unfeasible to provide relevant information to all readers.

When the first issue of Nederlandse letterkunde was published, I was in the early stages of my PhD research about Dutch poetry in the 1960s. I wrote about the textual version of the readymade, and the theoretical implications of works of art, and poetry, without inherent value. These works test the limit of what literary history can do – and similar questions were regularly raised in Nederlandse letterkunde: what should the subject of literary history be, and to what extent are the mechanisms of canonization a fact? The surroundings where I did my research were more traditional than Nederlandse letterkunde, something I recognized only in retrospect. In this article I question not only my research, but also – albeit briefly – the way in which canonization plays a part in publishing, and in the Literature Museum (The Hague). The Pantheon exhibition – which was literally a canon with the hundred most important authors of the Dutch language – is being replaced by a view of literary history that leaves more room for marginalized perspectives.

In the first issue of Nederlandse letterkunde, Dieuwke van der Poel analysed Der vrouwen heimelijcheit, a rhymed Middle Dutch text regarding all sorts of ‘women’s affairs’ such as conception, pregnancy and menstruation. She examined the text from a gender perspective and in particular from the different point of view of women as readers. Building on this approach, this article presents a brief overview of the research trends on gender in Middle Dutch literature since Van der Poel’s publication. The unique position of women as readers and writers is a central topic, alongside new developments in the field of user contexts. The increasing focus on manuscript variation offered new insights into readership and how readers (m/v/x) interact with their texts. In addition, intersectional analysis of the relationship between status and gender provides additional understanding of the possibilities and limitations of women and their role in both creating and interpreting Middle Dutch literature.

In the first volume of Nederlandse letterkunde, two prominent literary scholars in the field of early modern Dutch literature reflected on their monumental, innovative books, which were both published the year after (1997). Piet Buijnsters, first of all, presents his Bibliografie van Nederlandse school- en kinderboeken 1700-1800 (BNK), an extensive bibliography of all known children’s and school books published in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Riet Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, secondly, refers to Met en zonder Lauwerkrans, a sizeable anthology of women’s writing in the early modern Low Countries. In this essay, I discuss the impact of the Lauwerkrans and the BNK on 25 years of scholarship on early modern Dutch literature written by women as well as books addressed to young readers. I will argue that Buijnsters’s and Schenkeveld-van der Dussen’s call for text-analytical research on women’s and children’s literature is still urgent, as the abundance of recent scholarship was dedicated to the book market and the cultural-historical context of literature. I will also suggest a new line of research, in which the generally isolated dimensions of gender and age will be analysed in their continuous interaction.

This contribution takes the striking near-absence of intercultural and post-/ colonial issues from the first twenty-five editions of the journal Nederlandse letterkunde as the starting-point for a reflection on the monocultural focus and dazzling whiteness of the study of Dutch literature more in general. It starts with an overview of the origination of the debate about diversity within Dutch literature in the 1990’s, after which it continues to excavate three specific aspects of this debate and the racial mechanisms that play a role in this. First of all, it discusses the compartimentalisation of both Neerlandophone migration and postcolonial literature itself, and the study of this literature. Second, it examines the exoticization of ‘foreign-Dutch’ writers vis-à-vis their invisibility. And third, it analyzes several expressions of Dutch innocence and white victimhood. The contribution concludes with a plea to exchange the Dutch ideology of color-blindness, that works to cover up white privileges, for a form of critical race studies that addresses the multi-layered-ness of Dutch diversity, including that of whiteness.

In this essay, I consider the past quarter century in (Middle) Dutch studies and the effects of digitization on the field’s development. The increased level of digitization has affected the scholarly practice in multiple ways, most of which positive, including the increased usability and accessibility of source materials, primary and secondary literature and instruments for quantitative analysis. Digitization, however, also presents major challenges which have not always been properly identified, let alone solved, yet, such as the long-term sustainability of publications, cultural biases in digitization policies or the pressure on Dutch as a scientific publication language in a digital, and thus increasingly globalized academic world. Generational theory is a fruitful framework to discuss this situation, drawing a soft distinction between digital natives and earlier generations.

In this contribution the last twenty-five years of research concerning early modern Dutch theatre are discussed. Jan Konst argued that research of early modern Dutch theatre up to the year 2000 can be characterised as belonging to a historic paradigm. In this article it is argued that Dutch theatre research of the past two decades has been changing to include more critical reflections of society. It is maintained that this is needed so that theatre-historical research remains relevant in the twenty-first century.

The first issue of Nederlandse letterkunde contains two articles in which the famous Middle Dutch manuscript, known as the Lancelot Compilation (The Hague, Royal Library, ms. 129 A 10) is discussed. The articles are very early examples of the research method that has been known as ‘Material Philology’ since the late nineties. Both authors, W.P. Gerritsen and Soetje Oppenhuis de Jong, touch upon the so-called ‘Velthemprobleem’, the central issue of the debate concerning this manuscript. The question is what roles can be ascribed to Lodewijk van Velthem, the well-known Brabantine priest-author, whose name appears on the last folium of the compilation. Was he the compiler, the corrector or the main scribe of this manuscript? Anno 2021 there is a communis opinio about Velthem having been both the owner and compiler of the codex. Moreover, much has been discovered about the compilation’s broader literary network and environment and the persons involved in its making. However, there are still a lot of questions, which will undoubtedly keep researchers busy for some time yet.

This paper explores how an article by Marita Mathijsen on literary subsidies in the nineteenth century (1996, Nederlandse letterkunde) has served as a prelude to later research on post-romantic private literary patronage in The Netherlands on the one hand, and Dutch government policy on the other. It provides an overview of research carried out by Dutch researchers since 1996 into practices of and discourses on the public and private support of authors. Over the past two centuries, governments and private citizens have taken care of writers in multiple ways, with varying motives and with varying degrees of success. Since 1996, researchers have researched these practices from a number of angles. One important question they grappled with was whether these forms of public and private support are essentially similar and should be examined as such, or essentially different. Another dilemma: is it more effective to approach and examine writers after 1850 as passive recipients of charitable (emergency) aid, or to emphasize their role as (non)equal partners in the reciprocal relationships they maintained with their public or private benefactors? In the last section of the paper, the author outlines four directions in which (inter)national patronage research could develop over the next 25 years.

In recent decades the study of stereotypes, mostly on a national level, has witnessed a substantial popularity in the field of Dutch Studies. This article sketches the rise of this type of research and its connection to globalization and commercialization. It then reflects on the disadvantages of this kind of research in that it propels the persistence of patterns simply through repetition while its national focus can easily become a matter of tunnel vision. We propose to take serious what any ‘cultural archive’ demands in terms of reflection, epistemological delinking, and renewing, and to consider a much larger realm of representation in which stereotyping has a restricted role. We then come with a proposal for new directions of research in this field, in focusing on a so-called icon of Dutch identity: the windmill. This example serves to illustrate how the research we propose, aims to systematically link mentalities to materiality, ecology and economy; to chart the affective household that surrounds any kind of representation by giving materiality and bodies a central place in this context; and to come to a more integral analysis of the cultural techniques that propel and vectorize processes of representation.

Nowadays, autobiographical literature is omnipresent and takes many shapes. Despite that combining research methods from different lines of autobiography scholarship would be a welcome practice, so far, explicit methodological dialogues have not been a top priority in Dutch literary studies. This article takes the discussion between the two founders of the main research lines in international autobiography studies, Georges Gusdorf and Philippe Lejeune, as a frame to map the history of Dutch autobiography studies. It suggests that this frame enables us to understand the main research lines in Dutch autobiography studies as an author’s oriented line and a reader’s oriented line and exposes the scarcity of explicit methodological dialogues between them. By mapping a trio of recent research approaches outside of autobiography studies that are equally interested in the literary author, this article in conclusion offers some sources of inspiration for a mixed method-oriented future for the study of autobiographical literature.

The first issue of the journal Nederlandse letterkunde (1996) opened with an article about the historiography of modern Dutch poetry by Wiljan van den Akker and Gillis Dorleijn. Due to its prominent place in the new journal, it made a programmatic impression. This article aims at answering the following questions: what scientific intentions formed the basis of this article; how were the empirical findings translated into new hypotheses; and how did it inspire new approaches and practices in the field of literary historiography?

The very first article of the very first edition of Nederlandse letterkunde in 1996 was an article on poetry. Wiljan van den Akker and Gillis Dorleijn presented an empirical study in which they counted the number of poems that were published in magazines and the number of poetry books that were published in the Netherlands, between 1901 and 1940, by Dutch language poets who were alive at the time. They claim this method enabled them to research the complete production of poetry in that period. However, their choices concerning method and corpus excluded certain types of poetry based on gender, genre, medium and degree of autonomy. Since the publication of their article in 1996, several developments concerning poetry research in the Dutch language area have resulted in a shift from a top-down, book-centric, exclusive and autonomous perspective on poetry, to a bottom-up, media-wide, inclusive and heteronomous perspective on poetry.