137 RECENZIE / BOOK REVIEWS THEO D’HAEN (ed.): Dutch and Flemish Literature as World Literature New York – London – Oxford – New Delhi – Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2019. 321 pp. ISBN 978-1-5013-4012-3 World Literature Studies 3  vol. 13  2021 (137 – 149) DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2021.13.3.13 As part of its special series of English-lan- guage publications, Literatures as World Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing released the volume Dutch and Flemish Literature as World Literature in 2019 under the di- rection of the comparatist Teo D’haen. In chronological order it collects 20 relatively short contributions by 23 authors, who are mostly literary scholars from various coun- tries. Tey present their visions of the inter- national or intercultural contexts of Dutch and Flemish literary works and phenomena spanning eight centuries. In this case caution forces me to loosely speak of “international or intercultural contexts” instead of “world literature”, which has become a notion, espe- cially in Anglophone comparative literature studies, referring to the global circulation of works coming from national literatures mostly through the medium of English trans- lation. International or intercultural contexts are more appropriate here as a basic concept, because the phenomena discussed in the frst half of the book for example, in the section devoted to older literature, were not sub- ject to the global dynamics of circulation in the modern sense. Tose literary works which, in the Middle Ages and in the pe- riod of early modernity, made an impact outside of their original vernacular frame- work, can be considered, if anything, “Euro- pean literature”. In fact, the German scholar of Romance literature Ernst Robert Curtius pointed this out on the basis of the origin and reproduction of literary topoi in his now classical study as early as 1948. Terefore, in the case of the present pub- lication, we must speak of international and intercultural contexts, even though most of the contributing authors use the term “world literature”. Tey use it as a shibboleth, an agreed sign, sometimes with an obligato- ry reference to David Damrosch’s 2003 book. However, in the brief introduction (1–3), the editor Teo D’haen does not suggest any clear methodological point of departure. In fact, it is not clear from this introduction what phenomena of Dutch and Flemish lit- erature should be considered world litera- ture and why. Instead, D’haen mentions only the names of Dutch painters, who are global- ly better known than writers, and in the last paragraph vaguely (and unfortunately only superfcially) refers to the individual studies of the present volume. What can be consid- ered world literature in Dutch and Flemish literature is probably only to be answered by these individual contributions, and in- deed they do so, each in its own way, because the publication lacks a unifying principle. Before our eyes emerges a kaleidoscopic pic- ture, a kind of literary-historical potpourri, a fragmentary and methodologically un- clear picture of Dutch literature as “world literature”, which arose only on the occasion of this publication and apparently especial- ly for reasons of prestige, i.e. in order to in- crease the value of particular literary phe- nomena by making them “world literature”, and in some cases perhaps in order to have an article printed in an international academ- ic publication. Fortunately, there are a few obvious exceptions. On closer inspection, it is also striking that despite the reputation of most academics in the present publication, only a few of them have presented the results of personal research which is published here for the frst time. More ofen, these are more