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A Polyphonic Story. Authorship in the Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur

Authorship is a ‘trending topic’ in literary studies: specialists from all periods and languages have published widely on various topics such as posture, self-fashioning, and autonomy. This contribution investigates how these recent debates found their way into the new series of literary histories published on behalf of the Taalunie since 2006 (GNL). We discuss this matter along three lines. First, we show that in the different parts of the GNL there are multiple, sometimes contradicting notions of development of authorship. After that, we demonstrate that there does not seem to be a shared terminology: different scholars use words like ‘broodschrijver’ (hack-writer) with dissimilar meanings and connotations. Finally, it is noted that the writers of GNL-volumes do not have the same ideas about how to deal with authorial (re-)presentation in literary texts. We conclude that, although the editors aimed for a series based on shared starting points, there is not a single narrative about authorship in the GNL-series.