In the nineteenth century, regional stories about village life and the countryside were hugely popular, both within and outside Europe. This genre has been little studied in the Netherlands, partly because it is not always taken seriously by literary scholars and reviewers. And yet, it is important. In the nineteenth century, the genre served, among other things, as ethnographic exploration, repository of tradition and dialect, moral example, and to promote national awareness and domestic tourism. Early village stories were partly intended to introduce residents of the Netherlands to the customs of their fellow citizens: after all, the idea of a national community was still developing. Despite the emphasis on their typically local and national nature, these texts also proved easily transportable. Authors took inspiration from foreign writers, and Dutch texts were translated into German, French and English. In translation, the region sometimes turned out to be less important: so the stories are also more than regional. Furthermore, local identities were formed through contact with other cultures, through tourism, migration, conflict and literature. Regional literature also shows that stereotypes about the countryside could be flexibly deployed for a variety of purposes, such as defending traditions or, on the contrary, emphasising the need for modernisation.
Anneloek Scholten is a Literary Scholar and lecturer at the English Language and Culture Department of Utrecht University. She was trained in English, Medieval and Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and the University of York (UK). From 2020 to 2024, she worked as a PhD candidate at Radboud University, researching Dutch-language regional literature in a transnational context. This project was part of a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Vici project entitled ‘Redefining the Region’. Her research examines, among other things, the social role of literature, and how different norms and forms of knowledge come into conflict in fiction. She also explores the connections between literature and literary and other institutions, including universities. Her work has been published in English Studies, Journal of European Periodical Studies, De Moderne Tijd, and Dutch Crossing.