oa Terug naar de tekst – maar waarom zouden we?

Though claims of a crisis in Dutch literary studies are in the air, the diagnosis is far from clear. Against this background, the article argues that first of all, systematic research into the practices and dynamics of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination in literary studies from a historical perspective is needed. As a step into this direction the article undertakes a case study of the explicit motivations of research on textual transformations in the Netherlands of the last 40 years. The findings are placed into the context of what seem to be general tendencies of the discipline over the last decades, touching among other things upon general discussions of quality standards in the humanities.