Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2012

Around 1270 the Flemish author Jacob van Maerlant made an adaptation of Thomas of Cantimpré’s De natura rerum, called Der naturen bloeme. To date, 27 manuscripts of this text were known to scholars, both complete manuscripts and fragments. This article introduces a 28th witness, the fragmentary remains of a fourteenth-century manuscript. It consists of two snippets, with text from the fourth book (which is about ‘sea Read More

In 1884 Willem Kloos and Albert Verwey started work on Julia, a collection of forty poems written in the manner of the successful author Fiore della Neve (M.G.L. van Loghem). In their pamphlet The Incompetence of the Dutch Literary Critics (1886), in which Julia’s true authorship was revealed, Kloos and Verwey made plain that the poems had been conceived as deliberate nonsense, something the Dutch literary establishment h Read More

Novels come to life in the reader’s imagination where word and image go hand in hand. An intriguing type of novel is the one that displays visual images in the text. This type, however, constitutes a minority in recent literary history, as literature is of course primarily a verbal art. Traditionally, the pictures are believed to work against the reader’s narrative imagination. It is said that the process of imagination is fed precisely by Read More