Author Description

This introduction discusses some theoretical considerations and practical decisions that guided me in writing this book. Who would rather the concert without having to listen to the tuning of the instruments, you can skip this part. For three decades Dutch scholars have been complaining about Knuvelder's four-volume Handbook to the history of Dutch literature. Nevertheless, all these objections have still not led to an adequate replacement of this one-man work.1. However, many articles have been published about what a good literary history should look like. But that theoretical effort has not stimulated the actual handiwork - rather the opposite seems true. Because anyone who starts thinking about literary historiography is soon overwhelmed by the immense task that the literary historian takes on: how can one responsibly process the dozens of literary texts that have appeared in a certain period, plus the hundreds of articles about those texts, into one running story?