The Modern Period

Abstract

The Movement of the Eighties is often regarded as the beginning of ‘modern’ literature in the Netherlands. This is not an unreasonable point of view since the writers of the eighties broke radically with the values and ideas of their predecessors. Yet if one thinks in terms of centuries, the Movement clearly belonged to the nineteenth century, if only because of its links with the French symbolists, the poetry of Shelley and Keats, and the prose of Flaubert and Zola. From this angle twentieth-century literature may be said to begin with the reactions to the Movement of the Eighties, starting in the late nineties and gathering momentum in the early years of the new century.