Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 141, Issue 2, 2025

In literary studies, intertextual theory stresses that works are co-dependent. Because the concept of intertextuality is generally defined only vaguely, it covers a variety of phenomena, ranging from exact quotations over subtle allusions to higher-level genre constraints. Philologists have been studying textual correspondences between medieval works long before these connections were called intertexts. Most famously, K.H. Heeroma uncovered many parallel verse groups between Middle Dutch epics and argued that these could be indicative of shared authorship. Other scholars, however, argued that these intertexts more likely resulted from a genre-level convergence of the epic discourse. Here, I describe a computational system that deploys established methods from the field of information retrieval to automatically detect intertexts in Middle Dutch narrative fiction. The calibrated system is empirically evaluated on a sample of intertextual connections which were taken inventory of in prior work. We apply the system for the detection of micro-intertexts (correspondences of just two verse lines). Statistical analysis suggests that micro-intertexts indeed prominently occur within epic (sub)genres, but that they also feature commonly in the oeuvres of single authors. Finally, the system detects a wide array of previously undetected intertexts between epic works (such as the Lorreinen continuation and Limborch) that deserve a careful examination in future work, especially in the context of authorship attribution.

The ‘crisis of criticism’ is a recurring motif in the discourse on literary criticism. Due to digitalization and the rise of amateur criticism, however, the crisis of criticism is being actively re-articulated in the 21^st century. In this article, we trace this re-articulation in Dutch and Swedish newspapers since 2007. Based on a qualitative inquiry of metacritical statements we analyze what crisis is referred to and who or what is considered to be in crisis. By comparing the Dutch and Swedish discourses on literary reviewing we demonstrate how the image of the ‘professional’ critic is articulated differently in each country and how traditional demarcations gain new traction when critics position themselves alongside new (digital) forms of literary reviewing. In this way, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the transformations of literary reviewing within the (digital) literary sphere, as well as to why the practice is still considered to be relevant.