Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2015

Gender and the market of books. Women writers in the nineteenth century

According to the prevailing nineteenth-century opinion, the literary quality of the work of female authors was lower than that of their male colleagues. Dutch publishers, however, were not reluctant to publish novels by female authors. Market conditions were decisive. After 1835, the supply of novels generally published exceeded demand. Buyers valued morality above literary quality and, as the work of female authors presumably met high moral standards, publishing the work of women was a safe bid in a competitive market. But demand for female Dutch authors exceeded supply. Dutch (and Flemish) female authors were scarce and only at the end of the nineteenth century, when the ideas of feminism began to take effect, the number of Dutch female authors increased. It is noteworthy that some renowned publishers, such as P.N. van Kampen & Zoon and W.H. Kirberger, had an outspoken preference for women writers. These were so called ‘gentleman-publishers’, who had both material and idealistic grounds to publish the work of female authors. Female authors felt at home with this type of publisher as their values ​​and manners corresponded with the feminine self-image. Around 1880, three major developments influenced the publishing of Dutch female authors: unmarried middle-class women gained the right to paid employment, the ideal type of ‘business publisher’ rose and the audience became segmented into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow. The developments are explored in this article on the basis of data from a database created by the author.

Cooperations between Dutch Critics and Publishers during the Interbellum Period

The promotional activities of publishers and the different practices of literary critics became closely intertwined in the Netherlands during the first half of the twentieth century. In this article, we focus on how these two types of actors worked together and responded to new possibilities on the changing book market. We are particularly interested in what critics experienced as limitations or possible threats to their independent statuses and their positions in the field. These may have been most pressing for critics who had contacts with many different media and organizations. Such a central position within a literary network seems to be a characteristic of the so-called ‘middlebrow’ critic. Middlebrow critics were actively concerned with the social functions of literature and emphasized the need for cultural mediation. Our analysis of the behaviour and position-takings of three critics, Herman Robbers, Roel Houwink and P.H. Ritter Jr., shows that in their relationships with publishers, they operated within a grey area between commercialism and idealism, in which the (traditional) boundaries of ‘independent’ and professional criticism were at the same time consolidated, stretched and negotiated.

The adventures of a schoolgirl. Dorothea van Male, Schola Nostra (1971), and Hugo Claus’s rewriting practice

While Hugo Claus’s oeuvre has been studied abundantly (and fruitfully) from the perspective of erudite intertextuality, the rewriting of popular narrative culture in his novels has been neglected. This one-sided focus has clouded the protean nature of Claus’s texts, in which high and low, literate and vulgar coexist. By means of a case-study on the experimental novel Schola Nostra (1971), this article demonstrates the significance of popular narrative culture for the understanding of Claus’s oeuvre. Schola Nostra caused a lot of interpretative difficulties for contemporary literary critics, who dismissed it as a senseless ‘curiosity cabinet’; the novel has been overlooked ever since. By introducing reading keys which take Claus’s rewriting of literary as well as popular genres into account, it is however possible to shed light on this volatile publication. The approach is twofold: the first reading key is provided by the popular genre of the girl’s book, the second is related to the rewriting of markedly literary genres. This combination of reading perspectives enables a meaningful interpretation of the work; at the same time, it reveals Schola Nostra’s opposition to unambiguous reading schemes. By doing so, the analysis provides new poetical and interpretative tools to study the author’s novelistic oeuvre.