Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 29, Issue 2, 2024

Abstract This article contributes to the emergent study of the representation of masculinity by focusing on the construction of masculinity in a corpus of five male-authored Dutch novels from the late nineteenth century. The analysis is guided by the assumption that masculinity, including the domestic, sexual and societal dispositions of men, is increasingly questioned towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the Nethe Read More

Abstract The democratic, progressive and emancipatory potential of the novel has been emphasized many times by literary theorists. But although it has become a commonplace to frame the medium of the novel in this way, there is hardly any empirical evidence that novels historically reflect or shape social progress. Comparing two large corpora of Dutch novels from the 1960s and the 2010s, this article hypothesizes that gen Read More