Description
Joost van den Vondel, the most renowned poet of the Dutch Golden Age, can safely be called a Dutch literary icon. Already in his own time, he was regarded as the prince of poets. Many younger poets referred to him as a source of inspiration, which soon made him into a cultural model for a particular, classicist, approach. Vondel’s reputation has also shaped modern scholarship. Even in recent studies of seventeenth-century Dutch literature, Vondel is mostly not just a protagonist, but a standard with which to measure other authors. Since moneymaking did not fit the high ideals of Vondel’s classicist poetics, one of the striking consequences of his iconic status is a blind spot for the economic imperatives of literary authors.In this paper, I investigate which role Vondel’s iconicity has played in the early modern debate about moneymaking by literary authors. Did authors from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just like modern scholars, consider literary culture as a hierarchical place and did they see Vondel’s career as normative? In addressing these questions, I will make use of a corpus of written and visual sources dealing with profitable authorship, which I have developed in the context of my larger research project Poets and Profits. A New History of Dutch Literary Authorship (1550-1750) (funded by NWO). In so doing I aim to illuminate the significance of icons as cultural models in evaluating arts.
| Period | 25 Jan 2018 |
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| Event title | The Icon as Cultural Model : Past, Present, Future |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Amsterdam, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |