The Imagination of the Netherlands in 19th Century French Literature

The imagination of the Netherlands comes close to a mythoid aggregate. The corpus transmits a superficial and picturesque imagery, based on tourist, pictorial and historical sources. The tourist conventions reinforce its stereotypical and anachronistic nature. The anachronism is also typical of the images borrowed from paintings of the Dutch school and a few art historians. Realism is most appreciated when poetically tinged, as with Rembrandt who reveals the boundary between dream and reality. History provides the authors with heroic or dramatic episodes, as well as with legends expressing nat... Mehr ...