Boekenvrienden:Bemiddelende kritiek in Nederlandse publiekstijdschriften in het interbellum

Book Friends focuses on three men on a mission: Gerard van Eckeren, Roel Houwink and Anthonie Donker wanted to introduce as many people as possible to ‘good’ books. They were well-known cultural entrepreneurs in the Netherlands of the interwar period, who performed different roles (critic, publisher, editor, lecturer, radio speaker) and used divergent media (newspapers, periodicals, radio, lectures) to inform the general audience about literature. In this dissertation such ‘intermediating’ forms of literary criticism are analyzed, focusing in particular on periodicals such as Den Gulden Winckel, Elsevier’s Geïllustreerd Maandschrift en Critisch Bulletin. Although ‘intermediating’ forms of criticism should be considered part of an older cultural mediation tradition, the phenomenon got a new impulse and an entirely different nature in the interwar period. These cultural entrepreneurs responded to modern developments in media, advertising and technology and experimented with new forms and genres. Furthermore, they profited from the new economic possibilities of a literary market which expanded rapidly. Book Friends shows that the three critics worked from a shared set of ideals of cultural elevation: they believed in the power of literature for the individual reader and for the community as a whole. Literary criticism was supposed to contribute to the cultural education of the general audience. At the basis of their shared ideals however laid divergent social and religious backgrounds. Also, the ways in which they put their idealistic aims into practice differed. ‘Intermediating’ criticism can thus be considered a colorful phenomenon in the literary culture of the interwar years

To Review is Silver, to Conceal is Golden:Collaborations between Dutch Literary Critics and Publishers in the Interwar Period

Abstract Cooperations between Dutch Critics and Publishers during the Interbellum Period The promotional activities of publishers and the different practices of literary critics became closely intertwined in the Netherlands during the first half of the twentieth century. In this article, we focus on how these two types of actors worked together and responded to new possibilities on the changing book market. We are particularly interested in what critics experienced as limitations or possible threats to their independent statuses and their positions in the field. These may have been most pressing for critics who had contacts with many different media and organizations. Such a central position within a literary network seems to be a characteristic of the so-called ‘middlebrow’ critic. Middlebrow critics were actively concerned with the social functions of literature and emphasized the need for cultural mediation. Our analysis of the behaviour and position-takings of three critics, Herman Robbers, Roel Houwink and P.H. Ritter Jr., shows that in their relationships with publishers, they operated within a grey area between commercialism and idealism, in which the (traditional) boundaries of ‘independent’ and professional criticism were at the same time consolidated, stretched and negotiated.</jats:p