Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 The Middle Ages until circa 1400
- 2 The Late Middle Ages and the Age of the Rhetoricians, 1400–1560
- 3 The Dutch Revolt and the Golden Age, 1560–1700
- 4 Literature of the Enlightenment, 1700–1800
- 5 The Nineteenth Century, 1800–1880
- 6 Renewal and Reaction, 1880–1940
- 7 The Postwar Period, 1940–
- Bibliography
- List of English Translations of Literary Works
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmattter
5 - The Nineteenth Century, 1800–1880
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 The Middle Ages until circa 1400
- 2 The Late Middle Ages and the Age of the Rhetoricians, 1400–1560
- 3 The Dutch Revolt and the Golden Age, 1560–1700
- 4 Literature of the Enlightenment, 1700–1800
- 5 The Nineteenth Century, 1800–1880
- 6 Renewal and Reaction, 1880–1940
- 7 The Postwar Period, 1940–
- Bibliography
- List of English Translations of Literary Works
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmattter
Summary
Introduction
THERE IS A COUNTRY almost within sight of the shores of our island, whose literature is less known to us than that of Persia or Hindostan.” So writes the polyglot writer, traveler, and political economist John Bowring (1792–1872), whose interests included Dutch literature among many others. The introduction to Bowring's Batavian Anthology; or Specimens of the Dutch Poets (London, 1824) constitutes the first English language survey of Dutch letters, even though the actual anthology stops at the end of the seventeenth century. Five years later it was followed by Bowring's Sketch of the Language and Literature of Holland, another first. The book deals at length with Willem Bilderdijk, gives a very positive assessment of Hendrik Tollens and goes on to review briefly a whole series of contemporary literary figures, now virtually forgotten. In conclusion the author comments gloomily:
Holland is suffering under the visitation of an overflowing mediocrity. Many excellent and amiable men, whose poetry would sound sweetly by the firesides of their little social circle, have received but too much encouragement to break through it, in order to fascinate the world…. Sound and severe criticism is wanting — the criticism that, while it smites hard, smites well.
Some forty years later the verdict on Dutch literature, now flowing from a different pen, had scarcely improved:
A people that has never embodied an idea of its own . . . has never done anything but imitate and follow on behind — such a people, obviously, has no literature worth recording; and consequently in your country statues are erected of literary luminaries whose works have so little substance that anyone attempting to translate them into a cultured tongue is systematically defeated by the task.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Literary History of the Low Countries , pp. 369 - 462Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009