-
oa Achter de schermen van het recht
Advocaat Arie Mout als bemiddelaar tussen literatuur en recht
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Nederlandse Letterkunde, Volume 27, Issue 2, Sep 2022, p. 161 - 186
-
- 01 Sep 2022
Abstract
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.