Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 54, Issue 1, 2016

‘There is no justice for us…’: Van Hogendorp’s abolitionist play Kraspoekol (1800) as a trial against slavery

Theatre plays in which social abuses are criticised often display striking parallels to the civic court. Both in trials and theatre performances the complaining party is positioned against someone who defends the accused person or issue, each propagating different viewpoints towards a case, whereupon a judge has to decide on the matter. In the early modern era, plays served as experimental sites to conduct (fictional) cases. When the theatre curtain comes down, the audience is incited to express its opinion on the case that was staged. The case that takes central stage in this article is the accusation of Dutch colonial slavery in Dirk van Hogendorp’s antislavery drama Kraspoekol, of de slaaverny (1800). This play was highly controversial and its performance in The Hague caused great tumult. Drawing on studies of early modern and contemporary theatre, this contribution will examine the interlace of Kraspoekol and legal practice by looking at accusations (by slaves and abolitionist characters) and defences (by slave master Kraspoekol). The article addresses how the combination of showing and phrasing injustice might encourage Kraspoekol’s audience to ascribe itself the role by the judge and to condemn not only the wrongful treatment of the characters of Kraspoekol, but the entire slavery institution.

‘The devil taketh those people who grew up in wealth and sloth’: Indianised Europeans, a danger to the colonial system

From contemporary fiction on sea voyage appears a striking image. The ships that sailed between The Netherlands and Dutch East Indies, amidst 1850 and 1890, formed a micro colony: a compressed version of a colonial society. Practically, all components of a colonial community are represented on board. That includes the so-called backsliders: the Indianised Europeans. Analysis of eight novels on the sea voyages round Cape of Good Hope shows that Europeans that went native were represented in colonial discourse as a fundamental threat to colonial society, as they proved that the alleged superior Western civilization could be affected by supposed inferior Eastern cultures. For that encroaches upon the legitimacy of the colonial hegemony.

Länderschwerpunkt Niederlande: The Siegfried Unseld Archives and Dutch literature

In 2009 Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach (DLA) acquired the Siegfried Unseld Archives (SUA). SUA covers the period from 1945-2002 and includes material from the publishing houses such as Suhrkamp Verlag, Insel Verlag, Jüdischer Verlag and Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. The archive constitutes an important resource not only for the historians of literature and science, but also for the sociologists of literature dealing with literary translation. Scholars interested in Dutch literature will also find a wealth of research data in the archive. Suhrkamp Verlag, next to the publishers such as Hanser and Klett-Cotta, played a very important part in shaping the reception of Dutch literature in Germany. The paper discusses three stages in the production of literary translations in Suhrkamp Verlag between 1957-1990, focusing in particular on the selection procedure and the participation of the individual actors of the transfer.

‘Juggling with big words’: Register variation in Hugo Claus’s De verwondering (1962)

The prose of Hugo Claus has been the subject of broad scholarly interest, regarding – amongst other things – intertextuality and allegories. The presence of various, contrasting language registers has been briefly touched upon, but has – mainly because of the lack of an appropriate research method – never been studied in greater detail. This preliminary article analyses some excerpts of De verwondering (1962), the first novel in which Claus experiments with register variation, based on the stylistic methodology developed by Leech and Short (2007). The analyses demonstrate that this methodology is highly applicable to analyse not just ‘the style’ of a text, but also to ‘zoom in’ on various registers. In doing so, numerous aspects that help constitute (but at the same time undermine) a certain interpretation come more profoundly to the fore, showing that the study of register variation is promising, especially regarding novels in which different varieties of the same language appear.