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oa ‘Ter verdediging van den Franschen bekeerling’
De receptie van J.-K. Huysmans in De Katholiek
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Nederlandse Letterkunde, Volume 21, Issue 3, Dec 2016, p. 235 - 255
Abstract
‘To the defence of the French convert’: the reception of J.-K. Huysmans in De Katholiek
Until recently very little was known about the reception in the Netherlands of the French novelist J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907), an “inexplicable amalgam of a Parisian aesthete and a Dutch painter” as he called himself. When scholars referred to this question, they did so in a very circumstantial way and hence created several misunderstandings: in the Dutch Catholic press for example, critics hardly showed any interest in J.-K. Huysmans’ later, post-conversion writings. This article seeks to rectify this impression and, to this end, uses a case study to clarify this issue: De Katholiek, one of the major Catholic journals in the Netherlands at the turn of the century, almost systematically reviewed the latter part of Huysmans’ oeuvre.