Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 27, Issue 3, 2022

In Elizabeth Post’s epistolary novel Reinhart, of natuur en godsdienst (1791-1792), the eponymous protagonist leaves the Republic to become a plantation owner in Dutch Guiana. Throughout the novel, the reader is presented with the protagonist’s Eurocentric perspective on the local natural environment and his position as a human being in relation to that environment. This article will challenge the colonial interpretation of the novel’s perspectives on nature through an ecomaterialist and postcolonial reading. First, I will analyse how Reinhart imagines his interaction with the natural environment by appealing to conceptualisations inherent to several eighteenth-century literary genres such as pastoral and georgic poetry, the sentimental novel, and the Dutch ‘hofdicht’ or country house poem. I discuss how Reinhart’s depiction of his plantation through these genres may be considered a form of imaginative colonisation as he aims to cognitively domesticate Guyanese nature through European conceptualisations. Subsequently, I will address critical moments in the novel which invite an ecomaterialist imagination of the natural environment. Multiple climatological events disrupt Reinhart’s constructs of the environment, resulting in the protagonist’s increasing disillusionment with his own positioning within the natural and colonial environment of Dutch Guiana.

From a Dutch as well as an international perspective, eighteenth-century children’s books have received little attention from ecocritically inspired scholars so far, despite of the fact that these books structurally reflect relationships between human beings and their natural environment. I argue that these relationships are often depicted as ambiguous: human beings are connected to their environment because of both their resemblances and vital differences. Specifically focusing on two Dutch children’s books – Willem Emmery de Perponcher’s (1741-1819)Onderwijs voor kinderen (1782) and Johan Hendrik Swildens’ (1746-1809)Vaderlandsch A-B Boek voor de Nederlandsche Jeugd (1781) – I demonstrate that this ambivalent discourse fits into the didactical ambition to nurture citizens who were able to reflect on their social and political conditions and could actively contribute to socio-political improvement. De Perponcher and Swildens helped young readers to reflect on their position in a wider ecosystem, in which human beings, animals and nature exist in an equilibrium. As this equilibrium was implied to be a crucial precondition for the political social and economic harmony in Dutch society, the future stability of the ‘fatherland’ was imagined to be dependent on the ‘ecoliteracy’ of new generations: the skills to ‘read’ and understand the world as an organic whole in which everything is interconnected.

How are colonial violence and resistance entangled in Dutch plantation poetry? This article aims to answer this question through an analysis of Paul François Roos’Surinaamsche mengelpoëzy (1804), a collection of poems describing Suriname’s plantation culture. Previously, its representations of Suriname’s natural environment have been interpreted as exotic variations on pastoral conventions, offering a Eurocentric perspective on the colony. This article hypothesises that, even if literary conventions in the poems contributed to the concealment of colonial violence against the natural environment and the Afro-American population, an affective analysis can also reveal voices of dissent. To do so, it will combine ecocritical and postcolonial theory to demonstrate how Surinaamsche mengelpoëzy ‘naturalised’ distinctions between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and between ‘harmony’ and ‘combat’, asserting colonial order. However, when this representation of Suriname’s plantation culture is conceptualised as an ‘affective economy’ in which human and non-human bodies are interrelated through economic and ecological affects, these distinctions start to blur, and order is destabilised. Using Monique Allewaert’s concept of ‘ecological personhood’ ecological affects become visible as Afro-American resistance against European notions of individuality and sovereignty.

In this article, I create a place-centered and relational context for reading Eenige bladzijden uit het Boek der Natuur (Some pages from the Book of Nature), a didactical dialogue on natural history from 1846, written by Flanders’ national novelist from the nineteenth century, Hendrik Conscience (1812-1883). This context does not focus on his biography or his contributions to a pedagogical Flemish national identity, but relates the work to our present (urban) environment. By doing so, often overlooked aspects in Conscience’s Romantic thought come to the fore: the limitations he put to nationalist frameworks for understanding nature and his attempt at opening up the capacities of literary imagination. For Conscience, literary imagination – rather than religious tradition or empirical precision from physics –, even in a wild and chaotic text, appeared most suitable to convey the Humboldtian idea of the interconnectedness and unity of nature.

It was not until this century that ecology emerged as a major theme in Dutch-language literature. Most overviews of literary history, in fact, do not touch upon the subject. Reading historically situated literature in light of – and in dialogue with – the then-contemporary environmental debates can fill up this historiographical lacuna. In this article, I aim to do precisely that by presenting a contextualizing analysis of the Dutch literary production of 1972, the year in which 250.000 copies were sold of the Dutch translation of The Limits to Growth. My analysis focuses on a wide and diverse selection of texts, including poetry (Sonja Prins, H.H. ter Balkt, Lucebert, Robin Hannelore, Rutger Kopland, Dick Hillenius), prose (Gerrit Krol, Anton Koolhaas, Roel van Duyn, Ben Borgart), theatre (Walter Van den Broeck), comics (Suske en Wiske, Jommeke, Safari, Tom Poes), song lyrics (Farce Majeure, Jan De Wilde), diaries (Jan Wolkers), documentary scripts (Koolhaas for Bij de beesten af by Bert Haanstra; Geert Bekaert for De straat by Jef Cornelis), television interviews (Hillenius) and a special issue of the literary journal De Gids. The leading research question is: how did authors respond to the projected environmental crisis? Did they agree with the Club of Rome that there were, indeed, limits to growth? What causes of, and solutions for, this crisis did they identify?

In the field of animal studies, there has been an ongoing tradition of critique of anthropomorphism in (literary) representations of animals. To some extent, this critique is understandable: in order to emancipate the animal, this form of human appropriation should be questioned. However, the dangers of anthropomorphism have been qualified by scholars who point out that not anthropomorphism, but rather anthrophodenial – the a priori rejection of any similarities between humans and animals – might hinder an inclusive ecology in which humans and animals are interconnected. In this article, we illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial through an interpretation of five contemporary Dutch literary texts – two children’s books and three novels – in which animals play an important role. Specifically, we analyze stories revolving around a relationship between a human character and a dog as a companion species. Focusing on the ontological, political and narrative dimensions of these stories, we analyze, respectively: to what extent they suggest a binary opposition between human and non-human beings; how they reflect relations of power; and which narrative techniques are employed to represent animals.