Dutch literature

Literature of the Netherlands.

12th-15th centuries The earliest known poet to use the Dutch dialect was Hendrik (Heinrich) van Veldeke in the 12th century, but the finest example of early Gothic literature is Van Den Vos Reinaarde/About Reynard the Fox by a poet known as ‘Willem-who-made-the-Madoc’. Most of the anonymous work produced before the Renaissance comes from the Belgian parts of the Netherlands and includes Karel ende Elegast, from the 12th or 13th century, a Carolingian tale of great charm and humour; the 14th-century legend Beatrijs; the earliest European secular plays, known as the Abele Spelen; and the devotional plays of the late 15th century, Mariken van Nieumeghen and Elckerlyc (the original version of the English morality play Everyman). By this time chambers of rhetoric, rederijkerskamers, had been founded in most southern and a few northern towns, and their activities stimulated dramatic productions.

16th-17th centuries During the Reformation and early Renaissance the centre of commerce and art moved from the Catholic south to the Protestant north; by the ‘Golden Age’ of the 17th century, Amsterdam, having supplanted Antwerp as a trading centre, had become the centre of literary activity. The renaissance of learning and art in the new state is exemplified in the brilliant circle of the Muiderkring, named after the castle of the lyricist, playwright, and historian Pieter C Hooft, near Amsterdam. The great poets of this time either lived in Amsterdam or belonged to Hooft's circle: the lyricist, satirist, and dramatic poet Joost van den Vondel; the dramatist and lyrical poet Gerbrand Bredero; the humanist and satirist Constantijn Huygens; and the popular moralist Jakob Cats. Of the minor poets of the 20th century, the most gifted were Jacobus Revius (1586-1658) who, like Jan Luyken (1649-1712), wrote both devotional and secular poetry.

18th century The 18th century is more important for its classicist theory than for its literary production. Pieter Langendijk (1683-1756) wrote a number of comedies that are still performed and Justus van Effen (1684-1735) wrote some excellent essays and sketches for his journal founded on the model of the London Spectator. Towards the end of the century, however, a masterpiece appeared in a novel by two women, Elizabeth Bekker and Aagje Deken. Simultaneously, German Romanticism was influencing a number of minor sentimental poets, the finest of whom was Anthony Staring, but the most influential poet of this period was the more independent and voluminous Willem Bilderdijk.

19th century In the 19th century a bold attempt was made to restore a more critical approach to literature in the periodical De Gids/The Guide, founded by the scholar Reinier Bakhuizen van den Brink (1810-1865) and the author and critic Everhardus Potgieter (1808-1875). They failed, however, to enlist the support of Jacob Geel (1789-1862), the scholarly essayist whose style exemplified the kind of criticism needed, and De Gids later adopted a nationalist programme inspired by the historical novels of Walter Scott. The most important writers in this genre were Aernout Drost (1810-1834) for his didactic novel Hermingard van de Eikenterpen (1832), Jacob van Lennep, and Anna Bosboom-Toussaint. A more frivolous tone marks the work of a group of young authors of humorous sketches: G van de Linde (1808-1858), J P Hasebroek (1812-1896), J Kneppelhout (1814-1885), and Nikolaas Beets, influenced by the English writers Charles Lamb and Charles Dickens.

An entirely new style of prose writing was introduced in the remarkable novel Max Havelaar (1860) by the brilliant Romantic Eduard Douwes Dekker, who added to Laurence Sterne's kind of irony a radical unorthodoxy that was nearly a century ahead of its time. His writing was acclaimed by the young poets known as the Tachtigers, and the journal they founded 1885, De Nieuwe Gids/The New Guide, became the organ of the ‘Movement of 1880’. This movement, anticipated by Marcellus Emants (1848-1923) and Jacques Perk (1859-81), was headed by Willem Kloos, Albert Verwey, Frederik van Eeden, and Lodewijk van Deyssel (1864-1952), and its tenets of ‘art for art's sake’ and ‘art is passion’ influenced the poets Herman Gorter, Jan Hendrik Leopold (1865-1927), Henriette Roland Holst-van der Schalk (1869-1953), Peter Boutens (1870-1943), and Adriaan Roland Holst, and the short-story writer Jacobus van Looy (1855-1930).

A similar quest for renewal among the younger generation in Flanders led in 1893 to the establishment of the journal Van Nu en Straks/Today and Tomorrow, edited by August Vermeylen and others. Unlike the northern movement, however, this was partly inspired by the political and social aspirations of the Flemish language movement, initiated by Jan Frans Willems (1793-1846), popularized by Hendrik Conscience's nationalist historical novels, and attaining supreme literary expression in the poetry of Guido Gezelle. Whereas the naturalistic novel in the north was eclipsed by the realistic novels of Louis Couperus and the proletariat drama of Herman Heijermans, Gezelle's nephew Frank Lateur wrote a number of naturalist masterpieces in his west Flemish dialect. Thereafter, however, a general linguistic distinction between the literary works of the north and south is increasingly hard to find.

20th century On the other hand, the Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896-1928) introduced an expressionist lyricism in marked contrast to the predominantly introspective Romanticism of the northern poets. This Romanticism is best represented in its closing phases by the philosopher and humorist J A der Mouw (1863-1919, writing under the pseudonym Adwaita); the critic and scholar P N van Eyck (1887-1954); Jakobus Bloem (1887-1966); A Roland-Holst; and J Slauerhoff (1898-1936), who also wrote lyrical novellas. The vitalism in the poetry of Hendrik Marsman and the anti-aesthetic intellectualism of the literary journal Het Forum/The Forum (1932-35) under Menno ter Braak (1902-40), Du Perron (1899-1940), and Simon Vestdijk closed the period of ‘art for art's sake’ which had been so productive since 1880, in prose as well as poetry.

The greatest of the Romantic novelists of that period is undoubtedly Arthur van Schendel whose earlier writing shows a sensitivity similar to Aart van der Leeuw's (1876-1931). An entirely new, anti-literary, style was first used in 1918, in the humorous short stories of Nescio (the pseudonym of J H F Gronloh, 1882-1961), whose irony was matched in the southern Netherlands by Willem Elsschot (1882-1960) and whose literary style was some 30 years ahead of its time. Irony is also the mark of the realistic, even ‘cubist’ author Ferdinand Bordewijk (1884-1965). Realism and a vital, determined reaction against the Catholic Romanticism of his contemporaries, inspired the novels of the southerner Gerard Walschap (1898- ), while his compatriot Marnix Gijsen expressed detachment from his Catholic upbringing in ruthlessly objective and ironical character novels. In the Protestant poetry of the north after Het Forum, there was a less obvious trend towards humanism in the antimaterialist lyricism of Martinus Nijhoff and the primitive mysticism of Gerrit Achterberg (1905-1962).

The years of World War II were marked by the courage of those involved in publishing and distributing the large quantity of clandestine literature, rather than by the particular quality of this ‘resistance’ writing. The German occupation had a more obvious effect in the Netherlands than in Belgium. While G K van het Reve (1923- ), Harry Mulisch (1927- ), and Willem Frederik Hermans (1921- ) were writing novels of wartime chaos and personal alienation or loss of identity, the Belgian novelists Louis-Paul Boon, J Daisne (the pseudonym of H Thiery, 1912- ), I Michiels (1920- ), and H Claus were more concerned with structural experiments and an objective approach to psychological and moral problems. If the initiative in prose writing appears to have passed to the south, the experimental poetry of the generation of 1950 in the north (for example that of Lucebert, the pseudonym of L J Swaanswijk, 1924- ), has opened up new prospects there. See also Flemish literature.