Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 139, Issue 1, 2023

According to existing historiography the coffee house played an important role in the sociabilization of the late seventeenth- and the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie. The assumption in existing historiography is that the bourgeois went to the Dutch coffee houses to socialize, converse about political and ethical issues, and thus achieve personal growth. Sociabilization in the coffeehouses is assumed to have been encouraged by ‘literary socialization’: the conversations were spurred by the bourgeois’ reading of texts and introduced them to literary reading of these texts. In this article, we question this historiography for the case of Amsterdam between 1685 and 1785 by a closer investigation of both literary representations of coffee houses and judicial (notary) sources. Coffee houses often appear as scenes of gambling and violent encounters in the notary archives. Literary representations (plays, diaries) confirm a more dissolute and less civilizing character of the Amsterdamcoffeehouse. Moreover, the number of coffee houses in Amsterdam diminished in the eighteenth century, and literary representations are almost completely absent after 1730. They do not appear in a typical bourgeois novel such as Sara Burgerhart. We conclude that coffee houses did not play the key role in literary socialization and sociabilization previously assumed. The remaining question; which places did?

Literary awards play an important role in the production of prestige. Awardjuries typically substantiate their judgements by citing forms of literary quality that they believe are innate to the laureate’s work. However, their perception of quality is largely driven by circumstantial factors, such as the author’s demographic background, the publishers they are affiliated with, their time already spent in the literary field, and their previously won awards. This article examines the ways in which these circumstantial factors influence awarding behaviour, whilst drawing on field-theoretical approaches to literature. It argues that the more ‘prestigious’ an award is deemed, the more conservative its judging habitus becomes. In addition, it will be demonstrated, that the internal logic of the literary award scene steers new awards, which try to secure their claim to prestige, towards more conservative choices, as such making it difficult for authors who do not match the ‘conservative’ profile to win.