This is an interdisciplinary account of a now forgotten success story in the history of the society and culture of the Netherlands. Eight case studies of women writers between 1919 and 1970 trace the unconscious politics of the personal in narratives of women's identity and experience through close readings of texts located in the culture of the time. Jane Fenoulhet, whose knowledge of Dutch literature and culture in the twentieth century is unparalleled in the English-speaking world, tracks the public representation of women's private project of self development to the moment when the...

Cees Nooteboom (born 1933) is a writer of fiction, poetry and travel literature. Translated into at least thirty-four languages, his work raises important questions about the mobility of literary texts and invites a new theoretical approach, for to read Nooteboom straightforwardly as a Dutch author would be to do him an injustice. In this book, his fiction and travel writing are discussed on the basis of his English oeuvre, while the chapter on his poetry moves between Dutch and English editions. The first part of the study reflects on texts crossing boundaries and the ways in which literary...