https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8246-0233
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ABSTRACT
In many histories of nineteenth-century literature of the Low Countries, only a handful of authors are associated with emerging genres of regional fiction such as the village tale. In view of the immense popularity of regional literature, these histories overlook a large part of the literary field. This article aims to provide complementary perspectives by looking at how nineteenth-century Dutch and Flemish regional literature was framed and understood in contemporary reception, by systematically tracing all mentions of other artists and authors in reviews of selected authors. This has resulted in a ‘co-mention network’, revealing associations contemporary reviewers made between Dutch and Flemish regionalist writers and other cultural figures. This network functions as a starting point for investigating the impact of genre, gender and nationality on associations between authors, while also attending to which connections are not made, and which authors are left out of dominant narratives. Network analysis suggests that genre boundaries were fluid, and that numerous transnational authors were associated with Dutch and Flemish regionalists. At times nuancing or amending existing accounts of regionalism in literary histories, this article is also a tentative investigation of processes of canon-formation more broadly.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Ninge Engelen and Nils Lommerde for their invaluable contribution to the data collection for this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings in this study are openly available at https://github.com/roelsmeets/peripheral-networks.
Notes
1. Ten Brink, Geschiedenis der Noord-Nederlandse Letteren, 258-259.
2. ‘Het begrip der dorpsvertelling dient nauwkeuriger begrensd te worden.’ Ten Brink, Geschiedenis Der Noord-Nederlandse Letteren, 259.
3. Te Winkel, De ontwikkelingsgang der Nederlandsche letterkunde, 501–506; 328. Te Winkel’s overview of authors per region is comparatively extensive.
4. Knuvelder, Handboek tot de Geschiedenis der Nederlandse Letterkunde, 431, 566, 577–579.
5. Van den Berg and Couttenier, Alles is taal geworden, 399.
6. ‘dorpsnovelle,’ in Algemeen letterkundig lexicon (DBNL 2012). https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_00781.php
7. ‘dorpsroman,’ in Algemeen letterkundig lexicon (DBNL 2012). https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_00782.php
8. ‘streekliteratuur,’ in Algemeen letterkundig lexicon’ (DBNL 2012). https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_03045.php.
9. Discussed at length in De Geest et al., ‘The Case of Regional Literature’. The genre is often accused of being sentimental or simplistic.
10. Bel, Bloed en Rozen, 107, 356 (emphasis added).
11. De Geest et al., ‘The Case of Regional Literature’, 91, 96.
12. Howard, The Center of the World, 46.
13. Regional fiction is understood here simply as a mode of literature focusing on representations of regions that are represented as somehow distinct, for instance by being contrasted with national or metropolitan norms.
14. The importance of journalist reviewers in shaping a ‘literary frame of reference’ and canon is attested to in Rosengren, ‘Literary Criticism’.
15. By ‘dominant narrative’, we mean the narrative that has trickled down into mainstream literary history. Published reviews are also part of a (relatively) dominant discourse on contemporary culture – we do not have access to the perspective of most nineteenth-century readers, and many reviews on regional literature were written from urban centres – but they nevertheless offer a more varied, less uniform perspective on the literary field.
16. ‘Mentions’ are associations made by reviewers, and an indication of their literary frame of reference, indicating those authors that embody various literary traditions. Rosengren relies on ‘mentions technique’ to compare the literary frame of reference of journalistic reviewers to that in essays and academic histories. Rosengren, ‘Literary Criticism’.
17. For instance, Oosterholt usefully describes contemporary understandings of ‘popular’ literature and the distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ as it emerges in the reception of village tales, but he bases his analysis of reviews by only three leading literary critics: Kneppelhout, Potgieter, and Busken-Huet. Oosterholt, ‘Populaire literatuur?’.
18. This is also noted by Honings and Jensen, Romantici en revolutionairen, 321.
19. De Geest et al., ‘The Case of Regional Literature’, 96.
20. Keywords suggesting that an author is read as regionalist include ‘village tale’, ‘village author’, ‘heimat’, or ‘regional literature’, as well as mentions of specific (rural) regions.
21. Authors whose names do not occur in DBNL were presumably rarely reviewed, justifying their exclusion from our search in Delpher.
22. The code of conduct for nineteenth-century periodicals dictated that they had to review all the works they received, and they could not review works that had not been sent to them. Therefore, whether or not a specific magazine reviewed a book does not by itself reveal much about the book’s reception or critical appreciation: this depended entirely on whether the publisher decided to send a copy for review. See Streng, De roman in negentiende eeuw, 320–321. Due to the high number of books sent to many periodicals, reviewers sometimes opted for combined reviews of several books, or resorted to brief announcements that merely noted the existence of a recent publication. Longer reflections on books or literary developments, on the other hand, were often initiated by literary critics or editors. The combination of books in combined reviews does not necessarily imply that books were thought of as similar, and happened primarily because of limited time or space to review large numbers of books received. As such, co-appearances in combined reviews are not considered co-mentions.
23. Scholten, Smeets, Engelen, Lommerde 2021. Published online: https://github.com/roelsmeets/peripheral-networks
24. Literary histories themselves also show shifts in the way they frame regional fiction from the nineteenth century to the present, but to describe these in detail would require a separate study.
25. For an overview of this list, see nodes.csv on our freely accessible data repository.
26. For an overview of this list, see edges.csv on our freely accessible data repository https://github.com/roelsmeets/peripheral-networks
27. ‘De man die zijn volk leerde lezen’. For the origin of this widely-repeated catchphrase, see Schmook, ‘Wie heeft de slagzin “hij leerde zijn volk lezen” bedacht?’.
28. For an in-depth discussion of nineteenth-century understandings of genre in the Netherlands, see Streng, De roman in de negentiende eeuw, 67–121.
29. Modernist cultural production is, in many ways, characterized by networks and collaborations. See for instance Hannah, Networks of Modernism.
30. Only a few names recur repeatedly while many others are mentioned infrequently; and for some authors – like Streuvels or Buysse – literary historians do not always agree on whether they should be classed as regional.
31. Streng, De roman in de negentiende eeuw, 37, 92.
32. Campbell, ‘Realism and Regionalism’. For rural realism as ‘healthy’, see e.g. Belpaire, Het landleven in de letterkunde, 3, 42. For the wider association between rural culture and health, see Sintobin, ‘‘Schamel stuk mens?’, 311–12.
33. Bel, Bloed en rozen, 107, 356. The definition of ‘streekliteratuur’ (regions literature) in Het Algemeen Letterkundig Lexicon also suggests that some works that meet the definition’s criteria are not seen as exclusively regional because its problems and plot ‘exceed the typically regional’ (‘die het typisch streekgebondene overstijgt’), https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_03045.php. International scholarship suggests that this type of devaluation of regionalism as sentimental is a transnational trend. See for instance Dike, ‘Notes on Local Color,’ 81.
34. The connection between Streuvels and the visual arts is the subject of Sintobin et al (eds), Voor altijd onder de ogen, and Cremer’s paintings are discussed in Loos, ‘Jacob Cremer (1827–1880)’, but in literary surveys the importance of visual arts often remains unaddressed.
35. By for instance Ten Brink, Geschiedenis der Noord-Nederlandse Letteren, 259.
36. Heijse, ‘‘t Fingertje naast den duum,’ 366; Van Loon, ‘Het vervloekte geslacht,’ 122.
37. Van Loon’s review for Cohen explicitly mentions this trend in other countries, especially in Germany and Scandinavia.
38. As the introduction demonstrates, women writers are rarely linked to regionalist writing in several important literary histories and in the Algemeen Letterkundig Lexicon.
39. Te Winkel mentions Courtmans-Berchmans as Conscience’s contemporary in De ontwikkelingsgang der Nederlandsche letterkunde (326), and Bel mentions both Gijsen and Courtmans-Berchmans in Bloed en Rozen, but here, Courtmans-Berchmans is mentioned only briefly as an example of a well-known Flemish female writer without reference to her (regionalist) work, thereby implicitly suggesting that gender is seen as the most salient feature of her authorship (137).
40. An obituary in Het nieuws van den dag describes her as one of the most popular writers in Flanders, occupying a primary position in popular libraries alongside Sleeckx and Conscience. Anonymous, ‘Uit Zuid-Nederland’.
41. See the following reviews: Anonymous, ‘Leestafel’; Anonymous, ‘Boeken’; Anonymous, ‘Boeken Enz’; Anonymous, ‘Kinderboeken’; Anonymous, ‘Onze boekentafel’; Anonymous. ‘Kunst en letteren’; T. van den Blink, ‘Mondeling en schriftelijk stellen’; G., [review], N. van Hichtum, ‘Welke boeken’; J.Z.-B., ‘Lectuur’; and S. Rombouts, ‘Het klasse-leesboek.’
42. Streng, De roman in de negentiende eeuw, 427 (table 15). Streng’s data also suggests that novels from the English might have been reviewed more frequently, 454 (table 36).
43. Streng, De roman in de negentiende eeuw, 79.
44. Howard, The Center of the World, 42.
45. ‘Er zijn allerlei grensgevallen in de literatuur aanwijsbaar die weliswaar de genoemde kenmerken bezitten, maar desondanks niet of niet uitsluitend tot de streekliteratuur gerekend worden. Vaak is er dan sprake van een problematiek die het typisch streekgebondene overstijgt.’ Algemeen letterkundig lexicon, s.v. ‘streekliteratuur.’
46. Scholten, Smeets, Engelen, Lommerde 2021. Published online: https://github.com/roelsmeets/peripheral-networks
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Anneloek Scholten
Anneloek Scholten (1995) is a PhD candidate at Radboud University. Her dissertation considers the transnational dimensions of Dutch and Flemish regional literature in the long nineteenth century. Particularly, it focuses on the way the genre represents the relationship between the local, national and global, and the circulation of regional fiction across borders. Her research is part of the NWO-funded Vici project ‘Redefining the Region: The Transnational Dimensions of Local Colour.’
Roel Smeets
Roel Smeets (1991) is Assistant Professor of Modern Literature and Digital Culture at Radboud University. In his work, he uses data-driven methods to study literary representations.