This study examines how international political developments during the long 1990s (1989-2001) influenced the Poetry International Festival, focusing on both its programming and public image. It asks whether changing geopolitical conditions affected the selection of poets and the themes addressed in festival discussions. To analyse the festival's image, the study employs J & eacute;r & ocirc;me Meizoz's concept of posture, adapting it so it encompasses a set of auto- and hetero-representations of a collective actor. The analysis is based on five festival editions (1989, 1990, 1994, 2001, and 2002). The findings show that changes in the festival's auto- and hetero-representations were complex and uneven. In the early 1990s, Poetry International presented itself as a strongly politicized and activist festival, offering a 'safe haven' for dissident poets in a divided world. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not prevent Western intellectuals from reproducing Cold War - style divisions between Western Europe and other regions, particularly Central and Eastern Europe, even though non-Western voices sometimes challenged this view. In the early 2000s, the festival gradually shifted towards a more globalized and less explicitly politicized profile, reflecting broader post - Cold War trends in world poetry.

This paper is the first to map the role of anti-communism and communism in Dutch postwar cultural policies. We study the networks and relations between governmental cultural policymakers, the Dutch domestic security agency (Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst or BVD), and artists in the realm of culture and cultural policy. Citing policy documents, intelligence reports and correspondence between various government agencies, we aim to show how anti-communism, more than previously assumed, influenced the debate in the Netherlands on a (visual) arts policy between 1945 and 1952. The BVD reviewed the relations between artists, artist organizations and the Communist Party, but seemed reluctant to advise ministries directly. Instead, the agency was used as an instrument by anti-communist artists and informants to lobby for direct anti-communist action or better cultural policies. We discuss two cases in more detail: the attempt by the Dutch Federation of Visual Arts Organizations to leak incriminating facts about alleged communist artists to the BVD and the ministries, and the case of a journalist who used his position as a BVD informant to advise both the BVD and the ministries on cultural policy.

This article analyses the similarities between the oeuvres of the nineteenth-century poet Hendrik Tollens and the twentieth-century singer Zangeres Zonder Naam in the way they make use of the sentimentalist mode. Sentimentalism is a transhistorical, transmedial and transnational tradition of artworks that appeal to the emotions of the reader, listener or viewer; the mode notion enables the critical reader to analyse this tradition across the borders of countries, media and time periods. In this article's operationalisation of sentimentalism, this tradition is also strongly linked to an implied reader's or listener's reflexive view of an imagined world. Usually, that imagined world depicts the suffering of underprivileged groups. This article analyses and compares the tropes of these texts, revealing the janus head of sentimentalism. This mode promises its reader that through the heart-the seat of feeling, which can be reached through a precise and compassionate gaze-communication is possible between people from diverse social backgrounds. In practice, however, these inequalities are not only constantly named, but even strengthened by that naming.

This paper presents a creative writing approach that is aimed at critical literacy with regards to large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. We propose to connect creative writing with digital literacy on the one hand, and 'literary literacy' on the other. By appealing to students' literary imagination, we teach them to engage creatively and critically with (dominant discourses surrounding) LLMs, empowering students to understand the (im)possibilities of such models. Simultaneously, our approach allows students to gain insights into literary traditions, forms, and conventions, and enables them to challenge or play with such conventions. We first offer a theoretical foundation for our educational vision, introduce a Writing Model and situate it within current debates about digital literacy and creative writing in language/literature education in the Netherlands. We then report on our experiences with a Bachelor's course in Creative Writing at Utrecht University, which focused on LLMs.

This article examines the grant procedure of the Fonds voor de Letteren/Nederlands Letterenfonds (Dutch Foundation for Literature), which has been the main government agency for literary grants in the Netherlands since 1965. Through an analysis of a substantial body of applications submitted between 1966 and 2017, I explore how writers approached the application process and form. I argue that this subsidy scheme is related to issues concerning the artistic autonomy of writers (their freedom to produce the type of literature they prefer) and their professional autonomy (their ability to develop a career as a writer). While the artistic autonomy of writers was paramount in the 1960s, with their professional autonomy needing to be asserted during that period, the situation evolved over the subsequent fifty years. By the 2010s, the professional standing of writers was widely accepted, though their creative process was subject to more explicit guidance within the grant procedure.

This article discusses the Authors' Protest, organised by a group of Dutch literary writers in 1962-1963 to emphasize the need for governmental support for literature, and relates this protest to the debate on literary autonomy. The article follows Gisèle Sapiro's proposal to distinguish between autonomy as a feature of the literary field and autonomy as the institutional recognition of professional authorship. This distinction is linked to the analysis of so-called polities or value regimes, a methodology introduced by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. This methodology is a useful tool for analyzing value shifts and discussions about values in a domain such as the literary world. After a reconstruction of the wider debate about fair remuneration of authors (1955-1963), the analysis zooms in on the political as well as poetical debates about governmental support that writers were engaged in during the winter of 1962-1963. While the largest group of writers regarded government subsidies for literature as a means to gain more professional autonomy, a smaller group of writers feared that subsidies would let them lose their moral freedom. This debate was intertwined with a more fundamentally political discussion about the power that the state should exercise over the cultural field.

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For many, literature and marketing are considered opposite phenomena. This book discusses cases in which the two are closely connected. It argues that literature is subject to the same mechanisms as other commercial products: our experience of literary texts is prefigured by brands, trademarks that identify a product and differentiate it from its competitors. From the early modern period onwards, literary authors and their texts are constantly ‘branded’ and have been both the object and the trailblazer of a complex marketing process. The authors of this volume analyze this branding process throughout the centuries, focusing on the Netherlands. To what extent is our experience of Dutch literature prefigured by brands, and what role does branding play when introducing European authors in the Dutch literary field (or vice versa)? By answering these questions, Branding Books Across the Ages seeks to show how literary scholars understand branding – a phenomenon that has long been intertwined with literature.

In 2011, the Netherlands was invited to be the guest of honour at the Beijing Book Fair. This fair attracted controversy that revealed the tensions that exist between nation branding, public diplomacy, and literary autonomy: while its sponsor, the Ministry of Culture, regarded the fair as a perfect marketing opportunity, Amnesty International used the occasion to protest repression in China. Dutch authors invited to participate in the fair forged an alternative position by emphasizing their status as autonomous artists. However, an analysis of the debate in the Dutch media shows that both the Ministry, Amnesty International, the Dutch Foundation for Literature, and many authors interpreted the contact between Chinese and Dutch authors as a clash between an open(-minded) culture and a closed one.

This article presents the first diachronic overview of the economic, social and symbolic profits of 'city poets' ('stadsdichters') in the Low Countries. From the early fifteenth century onwards, there have been many (more or less) official relationships between city councils and poets. The prominence and the form of these relationships, however, diverged greatly in different periods: whereas official appointments were the standard in the fifteenth, sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries, the period in between saw a much more diverse landscape of informal appointments and relationships. After presenting a historical overview of the role of city poets throughout the centuries, this article focuses on two well-documented periods in which formal agreements were made between town governments and poets: the late Middle Ages and the start of the 21st century. We analyze political and financial agreements explicitly in relationship to the complexities surrounding the production of city poetry. City poetry, paid by public money, is bound to be controversial: in general because its status is subject to changes and political discussions, but also because this form of commissioned poetry is sometimes seen as a form of propaganda. Official city poetry seems to flourish most in societies with a stable political-religious climate (as in the Southern Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth century) and/or with a keen interest in city marketing (as in Flanders and the Netherlands in the twenty-first century).

This article argues that it is both important and viable to develop a diachronic perspective on the profits of literary authors in the Low Countries. Up to now, conceptual and theoretical boundaries between different subdisciplines within Dutch literary studies have resulted in a compartmentalized, fragmentary narrative of the economic, social and symbolic profits of literary authors throughout the centuries. On the basis of a survey of the theoretical frameworks dominant in the subdisciplines of medieval, early modern and modern Dutch literature, we highlight the opportunities and difficulties for a diachronic perspective on financial advancement, focusing both on practice and discourse. In addition, we propose a schematic model that tries to overcome the difficulties and enables us to profit from the opportunities. This proposal allows for a sharper focus on both the practice of and discourse on literary authors’ economic gain from a diachronic perspective.

A grand narrative of Dutch literary authors’ opportunities to economically profit from their writing is yet to be written. The general assumption, however, is that these opportunities developed teleologically from a dominant system of patronage during medieval and early modern times, in which financial gains were marginal and in which author’s independence of their supporters was constrained, to a system in which the commercial book market was dominant and where authors could be more self-supporting and thus more independent of supporters. This article argues that there is no such teleology. On the contrary: on the basis of an exploration of both practice and discourse of literary authors’ profits from the Middle Ages to the present, we conclude that in every period, it was possible for authors to profit from their writing through either patronage, market or governmental support, and often through a combination of these sources. Moreover, in every period varying types of independence of literary authors was valued highly. Our analysis of the discourse on profits shows that the continuous tendency to disguise financial advancement could be related to the importance of authorial independence throughout the ages.

Did the language of Dutch novels and newspaper articles become less complex between the 1950s and the 2010s? Based on a corpus of 60 novels, published in three different decades, and 200 newspaper articles, published in two decades, an analysis of stylistic phenomena was conducted, using T-scan, a tool for automatic analysis of Dutch language. The analysis focused on four aspects of complexity: word and sentence complexity, cohesion and personalisation. This analysis showed that while the language of the newspaper articles did change on all levels between 1950 and 2000, the language of the novels did not change substantially. The language of the news articles is more complex than the language of the novels, across different decades. A further analysis of stylistic phenomena in novels revealed some interesting relations between language and content.