'Een literair fenomeen van de eerste orde'. Evaluaties in de Nederlandse literaire dagbladkritiek, 1955-2005: een kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve analyse

摘要

This dissertation concerns the evaluations of critics in literary book reviewing in Dutch newspapers between 1955 and 2005. Analyses of literary evaluation in its literary-historical context have so far tended to concentrate on specific case studies – the reception of a single book or author, the poetics of a single reviewer – or on sociological aspects of book reviewing. This study, which is part of a larger research project titledThe Best Intentions, Literary Criticism in the Netherlands 1945-2005, aims to explore and describe which developments and continuities might be gleaned from evaluative statements in book reviews themselves. Both the critics’ judgments on (and characterizations of) literary works in reviews are considered relevant, because they affect relations and positions in the literary field. By employing both quantitative and qualitative analyses of evaluative statements, this study endeavors to test prevailing – but hitherto uncharted – hypotheses concerning various continuities and transformations in the realm of newspaper reviews of literary novels