No abstract

Joannes Matthias Schrant (1783-1866) became the first professor of Dutch Language at the University of Ghent from 1818 to 1830 and was appointed professor at the University of Leiden from 1831 to 1853. Several scholars of Dutch studies have discussed Schrant’s scientific work and concluded that he was an unimportant and uninteresting figure, mainly for his insignificant role in the development of Dutch studies, because he only built upon the scientific ideas of Matthijs Siegenbeek and did not offer his own insights on language and literature. In this article, I adjust this negative view of Schrant as an insignificant figure by studying his scholarly work in the context of the ‘cultivation of culture’ (). Schrant was a typical cultivator of national culture: his speeches, literary histories, and editorial work show he was an active scholar who disseminated, sustained, and extended existing ideas about national culture. He did not just disseminate these ideas in his function of professor, but also as a member of the literary societies Regat Prudentia Vires and the Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde, and as a public intellectual.

Dutch literary historians have nearly always regarded the genre of the river poem (in Dutch: stroomdicht) as uninteresting. When river poetry is discussed, it is usually discussed in the context of odes to cities. Anglo-Saxon literary historians have paid more attention to the genre of river poetry and interpreted the early-modern river poem in the context of both the search for national and regional identity and the confirmation or refutation of male, upper-class authority. In this article, it is demonstrated that these frameworks of interpretation can be of use in the analysis of two (once) well-known exponents of Dutch eighteenth-century river poems: Dirk Smits’s De Rottestroom (1750) and N.S. van Winter’s De Amstelstroom (1755). Both river poems establish and justify male, upper-class authority; Smits constructs a predominantly regional identity through images of the Rotte basin, while Van Winter cultivates a national identity through the image of Amsterdam as centre of the Dutch Republic.