Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2010

The Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein is ‘an acknowledged Arthurian masterpiece with few equals in any language’ (Norris Lacy). Striking to the work is that two authors wrote a large romance, in which the nephew of King Arthur is the only protagonist. This choice is something new in comparison with the works of the creator of the genre, Chrétien de Troyes. In his great adventure, that takes place in the Otherworld of Read More

In this contribution I examine how Flemish nineteenth-century men of letters, and more specifically: historical novelists, presented themselves on the first textual ‘thresholds’ that readers encounter when they open a book, namely the title page and the dedication. These peritexts not only show how the novelists presented themselves to the outside world, i.e., the profile they wanted to create for themselves; they also provi Read More

The perception of texts as being postmodern fiction can lead to a somewhat reductive and defensive reading of those texts. Especially with an eye on intertextual relations, the theoretical postmodern or deconstructive approaches seem to be the only acceptable instrument to understand the complex dynamics of the texts. As a following, the attention is drawn exclusively on the particularly dominant aspects of self-reflexivity. I Read More