Dutch literature

Introduction
Medieval literary works
- Poetry and prose
- Songs, drama, and the rhetoricians
The Renaissance and Reformation
The 17th century
- The writers of the “Golden Age”
- Religious poetry
The 18th century
The 19th century
- Romanticism
- Movement of the 1880s
The 20th century

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Quizzes

4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul

Famous Poets and Poetic Form

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:

Poetry: First Lines

Related Questions

How did Anna Bijns use satire during the Reformation?
How did Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken use letters as a form of storytelling?
How did Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert influence Dutch prose and standard Dutch?
How did Frisian literature preserve a language distinct from Dutch literature?
How did Gerard Reve combine fact and fiction in Nader tot U?
How did Gerbrand Adriaenszoon Bredero use Amsterdam life in his comedies?
How did Gerrit Achterberg explore life and death in his poetry?
How did Gerrit Komrij revive traditional forms such as sonnets and rhyme?
How did Hendrik Marsman use free verse and Vitalist ideas in his poetry?
How did Henriëtte Roland Holst-van der Schalk express socialist ideas in poetry?
How did Herman Gorter become a leading poet of the Tachtigers movement?
How did Hooft’s castle at Muiden become a center for artists and scholars?
How did Jacques Perk’s Mathilde help begin a new period in Dutch poetry?
How did Jan Baptista van der Noot introduce Petrarchan sonnets into Dutch literature?
How did Joost van den Vondel’s conversion to Roman Catholicism affect his life and writing?
How did Latin and French limit the use of Dutch in early medieval writing?
How did Menno ter Braak and Edgar du Perron criticize superficial elegance in literature?
How did Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft bring Italian Renaissance styles into Dutch writing?
How did Romanticism change Dutch literature in the 19th century?
How did Walter Scott influence Dutch historical novels?
How did Willem Frederik Hermans portray war and human uncertainty in The Dark Room of Damocles?
How did literary societies affect Dutch writing in the 18th century?
How did religious exile affect Renaissance writers in the Netherlands?
How did the Dutch Golden Age encourage the growth of literature and historical writing?
How did the Dutch standard written language emerge in the 17th century?
How did the Tachtigers differ from earlier Dutch literary movements?
How did the Vijftigers change Dutch poetry after World War II?
How have Dutch and Flemish writers cooperated since the 1930s?
What subjects did Constantijn Huygens explore in his poetry?
What techniques did Lucebert use in his experimental poetry?
What themes of disillusionment appear in Jan Jacob Slauerhoff’s poetry?
What was the purpose of Philips van Marnix van Sint Aldegonde’s Biencorf der H. Roomsche Kercke?
Which plays by Joost van den Vondel are considered his major works?
Which writers led the Tachtigers movement in Dutch literature?
Why did Dutch literature decline during much of the 18th century?
Why did poets after the Vijftigers adopt a more restrained and prose-like style?
Why did the cultural importance of Dutch shift from Flanders to Brabant and then Amsterdam?
Why is Bredero’s Spaanschen Brabander considered an important Dutch comedy?
Why is De historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart important in Dutch literary history?
Why was De nieuwe gids important to the Dutch literary revival of the 1880s?
Why was Gysbert Japicx important to the survival of Frisian as a literary language?
Why was Multatuli’s Max Havelaar controversial?
Why was the literary journal Forum founded in 1932?
Why was the relationship between Calvinism and Renaissance humanism difficult for 17th-century Dutch writers?
Why were chapbooks important during the Renaissance and Reformation in the Netherlands?

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Fact Monster - Entertainment - Dutch and Flemish literature
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Dutch literature

Also known as: Netherlandic literature

Written by

Gerard Willem Huygens

Professor of History and Dutch Literature, Rotterdam Lyceum, The Netherlands. Author of The Dutch Writer and His Public.

Gerard Willem HuygensAll

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Britannica Editors

Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....

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History

Dutch literature, the body of written works in the Dutch language as spoken in the Netherlands and northern Belgium. The Dutch-language literature of Belgium is treated in Belgian literature. Of the earliest inhabitants of the Netherlands, only the Frisians have survived, and they have maintained a separate language and literature since the 8th century. The remainder of the Netherlands was colonized by the Saxons and Franks between the 3rd and 9th centuries, resulting in a...

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