Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 27, Issue 2, 2022

Opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines and scholarly contributions alike are rife with indignant voices addressing the neglect or underestimation of women in high literature. While recent years have witnessed an upsurge in empirical, quantitative underpinning of the assumptions underlying this accusatory discourse, much of the extant literary research uses methods of close reading and critical discourse analysis. We argue that the field could benefit from more statistically informed additional studies that rely on distant reading methods. In this article, we look at Dutch literary histories published from the nineteenth century onwards. Using sentiment analysis and linear mixed-models we gauge the differences in appreciation of over 400 male and female authors, born between 1550 to 1850, and we look into longitudinal trends. Have literary historians been writing differently about female authors than about male authors? And has this changed over time? Our results indicate that, contrary to what is oftentimes suggested, women are associated with more positive words. Men, on the other hand, are associated with words higher in arousal and power. There is no visible trend over time, except for the power dimension: the gender gap has widened over the years.

Literary trials are hard to examine due to the usually very limited range of relevant documents available, especially concerning questions regarding the poetics of the juridical actors. Research into mediators between law and literature might offer more reliable insights on this point. One of these mediators was the lawyer A. Mout, who defended W.F. Hermans in trials concerning his novel Ik heb altijd gelijk (1951/1952) and Françoise Sagan and her publisher against T.W.G. Denessen, and who functioned as a lawyer in the trials against the Bob en Daphne series. At the same time, Mout was a literary critic, a writer of fiction and the chairman of the Dutch academy of literature.

This case study, in which A. Mout’s external poetics are reconstructed, validates and concretizes the most dominant ideas on literature views within case law in the first half of the twentieth century; it shows a fundament in idealistic aesthetics and a convincing orientation on the Tachtigers. More generally, this study shows that research into mediators between literature and law offers a fruitful method to paint a clearer picture of concepts of literature among jurists; both concerning institutions and poetics, in legal cases and beyond.

In Babylon (1997) by the Dutch author Marcel Möring seems to be highly self-reflexive, just in line with the non-committed way most postmodern novels have been characterized. What tends to be overlooked in this characterization however is that a very real historic event lies at the basis of the novel’s foundation, namely the Shoah and its aftermath. This event permeates the whole structure of the novel. As argued in this article, this foundation is implied, amongst other things, by the presence of ghosts. Read in conjunction with Van Dijk’s and Whitehead’s analyses of trauma in contemporary novels, and with a focus on haunting and intertextuality, this article demonstrates both the presence of and the struggle of the text with the notion of loss.

Kader Abdolah, a Dutch author of Iranian origin, repeatedly sketches father and mother characters who can be seen as representations of his own parents. As they are handicapped in their ability to communicate (the father is deaf and the mother suffers from deteriorating dementia) the son takes upon himself the task to tell their stories. This article presents an analysis of Abdolah’s works in which father and mother figures feature prominently, Spijkerschrift [Cuneiform] (2000) and Het gordijn [The Curtain] (2017). Referring to theoretical studies about the representation of proximate others in autobiographical writing, an attempt is made to answer the question about the character of these representations and their role. Because both parents are disabled, the analysis presented here is based furthermore on theoretical studies concerning representations of disability in (autobiographical) literature. As it turns out, disability is often being used as a narrative prosthesis that serves the author to catch the readers’ attention and to frame his or her story. As a result, disabled others are often being ‘absented’: their stories are being subordinated to the author’s own purpose, presenting themselves to their readership in a particular way.