Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2009

After the secularization which, analogous to developments in western culture as a whole, established itself in nineteenth and twentieth century Dutch literature, a countermovement has recently been noticed. In the works of several authors one sees a distinct religious and ethical reorientation. This article focuses on the case of the novelist and essayist Frans Kellendonk (1952-1990), who articulated his social, politi Read More

The recent come-back of master narratives illustrates the political turn in the historical discipline. Poststructural and postmodernist theoretical approaches to history in the past decades have resulted in plural or even fragmented views on the past that are not considered helpful in the search for a coherent national identity. In response to the call for grand and coherent views on the Dutch and their history, a new histori Read More

The Dutch literary writer Harry Mulisch has an ongoing project of reflecting on the nature of historiography. In several essays he opposed the narrative reconstruction of the historian to the experience of the historical moment itself. History recreates the past as a closed ‘then’, whereas literature can recreate the past in a new kind of ‘present’. In this article Sander Bax relates Mulisch’ philosophical ideas on historiograph Read More

There is no consensus among literary scholars concerning the delimitation of postmodernism in Dutch and Flemish fiction. More specifically, scholars do not agree about the position of experimental ‘other prose’ and its relationship to the postmodern novel. This article contributes to this on-going debate by offering a comparative analysis of other prose and postmodern fiction. It focuses on the concept of representation: i Read More

This article offers a new interpretation of one of the main works of Louis Ferron: De keisnijder van Fichtenwald [The stone-cutter of Fichtenwald] (1976). The hypothesis elaborated here is that, in the guise of Friedolien Mahler, voice is given to a Nazi-Täter who does all he can to obscure his role in the war and his ideas, which are fed into by the ideology of national socialism. In order to show this, a rhetorical reading of the no Read More