On Literature
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers with Dutch reading ability who want to understand the early twentieth-century Dutch view of literature
- Literature students researching the history of foreign criticism who need primary Dutch materials
- Comparative literature enthusiasts interested in the tradition of literary criticism in Europe's smaller languages
Not a good fit for
- Ordinary readers with no knowledge of Dutch who hope to read a Chinese translation
- Readers expecting a systematic textbook of literary theory or a methodological toolbook
- Readers who only want contemporary criticism and lack patience for texts a century old
Reading tips
- Read the table of contents and the first and last chapters first to grasp the author's basic definition of "literature", then move on to the specific discussions
- Keep a notebook to record the critical terms the author uses, for easy comparison with contemporary English and French criticism
- No need to read word by word; read selectively by theme and use the e-edition as a searchable database
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
M. H. Van Campen (1874–1942) was a Dutch writer on literature and literary criticism active from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Public information about his life is limited: his education, professional career and social activities are not clearly documented, and what can be confirmed about him rests mainly on his published writings. Two of his works are held in the collection, both entitled Over literatuur (On Literature), and both belong to discursive writing about literature. Judging from their titles and form, he was concerned with questions of literature itself—the understanding of works, criticism and reading taste—writing in a manner that combines the essay with the review, emphasizing discussion and evaluation rather than systematic theory. Such writing served in the Dutch literary world of the time as a bridge introducing works and connecting readers with literature. Although his life remains obscure in the historical record, these two works of the same title offer a useful sample for later readers seeking to understand the character of Dutch literary criticism in that period.
