Journal of Dutch Literature

Cultural Hybridity Reconsidered: Religious Visual Culture and the Dutch Republic

Els Stronks

This article engages with the overriding tendency to see cultural hybridity as a progressive force in the Dutch Republic, focusing on the case of Dutch religious literature. It is a puzzling fact that in the literary realm, processes of cultural hybridity were put on hold between 1560 and 1680. In this area of cultural activity impermeable barriers between Catholic visual practices and Protestant textual traditions caused religious books to be virtually imageless. Given our current understanding of cultural hybridity and of seventeenth-century Dutch culture, why was the intermingling of textual and visual practices so unexpectedly complicated, especially in comparison to neighbouring countries where hybrid religious literary cultures emerged in spite of restrictive mechanisms such as censorship and legislation? How does the reluctance in the literary sphere relate to other cultural domains in the Dutch Republic, and to the tendency to see the Dutch Republic’s culture as a historical model of cultural hybridity?

Writing the Living and the Dead. The Dutch Writer Hella S. Haasse as (Auto)Biographer

Jane Fenoulhet

This article is about Hella Haasse as a life writer. It considers her life writing in the context of her work as a whole before focusing on her experimentation with biographical and autobiographical writing as textual performances of selves. I argue that the relationship between the writer and her historical, biographical subject is affected by her attempts to grapple with her own life, past and present, in autobiographical texts. More specifically, I analyse Haasse’s literary experiment in terms of multiple, nomadic subjectivity with an emphasis on Haasse’s textual representation of processes of becoming.

Cannibalism and Literary Indigestibility: Figurations of Violence in Bart Koubaa’s De leraar

Maria Boletsi

Several novels that respond to the events on September 11, 2001 in more or less direct ways engage with the issue of violence. While many of these novels centre on external agents of violence inflicted upon Western societies, this article draws attention to recent literary preoccupations with violence as an intra-European phenomenon by zooming in on Bart Koubaa’s novel De leraar (2009): the narrative of a disillusioned teacher who turns out to be a cannibal. The article analyses the intertwinement of different forms of violence in this novel in the context of recent rearrangements in the European political landscape, a politics of fear of ‘others’ and, particularly, a shift in Dutch public rhetoric on migration and multiculturalism labelled as ‘new realism’. Through an ambivalent and often ironic use of ‘new realist’, liberal humanist, and right-wing discourses, the novel teases out the violent desires inherent in dominant European discourses on migration, tolerance and hospitality, and the interrelatedness of ‘external’ violence, such as terrorism, with a kind of violence generated by the liberal West.

The article unravels the novel’s performance and critique of violence, and addresses its affective operations on the reader by introducing the concept of ‘literary indigestibility’. This concept is brought to bear on the implications of literature’s subjectivisation of ‘indigestible’, untranslatable subjects (here, a European cannibal), as well as literature’s potential intervention in public rhetoric in ways that cannot be easily ‘digested’, i.e. appropriated into familiar categories and ‘rational’ arguments.

Time and again: Anachronism and the Gothic in Vonne van der Meer’s Spookliefde

Agnes Andeweg

This article examines Vonne van der Meer’s Spookliefde. Een Iers verhaal (Ghost Love. An Irish Tale, 1995) with a Gothic frame of interpretation. Taking my cue from the suggestion made by Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall (2000) that Gothic criticism should pay more attention to historical and geographical references, I argue that Spookliefde‘s Irish setting is a realistic setting for exploring the tensions and parallels between sexual desire and religious desire, between determinacy and surrender. The analysis of anachronism in Spookliefde shows the potential connections between historical context and modernisation processes at the time of publication. At the same time, Spookliefde contests Baldick and Mighall’s argument that Gothic novels confirm modern values through anachronisms.

Review: Reconsidering the Postmodern. European Literature beyond Relativism

Anders Pettersson