Challenging the Autonomous Realm of Literature: Nieuwe Zakelijkheid and Poetry in the Dutch Literary Field

The term Nieuwe Zakelijkheid has mainly been used to indicate prose not poetry during the 1930s in Dutch literary criticism and academic criticism; literary historiography followed this practice. This contribution shows that Nieuwe Zakelijkheid and poetry are nevertheless closely intertwined in Dutch discourse of the interwar period. The generation of poets that announced themselves in the early 1930s were deeply affected by it and the critics pointing out to their poetic products classified them as nieuw-zakelijk accordingly. The use of Nieuwe Zakelijkheid takes place in an international context of an upcoming generation advocating a new way of life, burying the past, cleaning the slate with an urgent aspiration to build a new existence on a radically different basis. Poetry of that time and its reception should be understood in the context of this new mentality. This wide-ranging process of generational change becomes visible in the critics’ classification behavior and the self-fashioning activities of the poets in the Netherlands. A final point of attention is related to the relative autonomy of the Dutch literary field of that time. In the viewpoint of those participating in the literary field, literature has acquired an autonomous position, but nieuw-zakelijke poetry and the discourse of the new modern mentality appeared to challenge this particular status. This contribution gives an outline of the problem poets and critics were confronted with and the way they tried to find a way out and preserve the autonomous realm of poetry