Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 27, Issue 3, 2022

Abstract 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 interp Read More

Abstract 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 th Read More

Abstract 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 Euroc Read More

Abstract 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 Read More

Abstract 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 D Read More

Abstract 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 anth Read More