Overview

Of the five research essays collected here, two are excursions by the author chronologically outlining and discussing the history of English novel criticism from 1660 to 1800, and paying special attention to the terms 'novel', 'romance' and 'history'. Two are concerned with excursions dealt with in literary texts themselves, the first being on how continental excursions by English Renaissance gentlemen influenced their dress habits as these were discussed and criticized at home; the second being on the haunting excursion undertaken by Coleridge's Romantic Ancient Mariner, showing how and why it can be interpreted as his agonizing introduction into becoming a literary artist. The fifth essay maps out the excursion of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man into Holland, by way of the five translations made of it in the 18th and 19th centuries, supplemented with a checklist of all his other works translated into Dutch. The research was done some time ago, but the results were not published earlier otherwise than in abstract form or in media with limited circulation. For many years Dr. C.W. Schoneveld was lecturer in the history of English Literature at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Two of his publications are Intertraffic of the Mind, Studies in 17th-Century Anglo-Dutch Translation (1983), and Sea-Changes, Studies in Three Centuries of Anglo-Dutch cultural Transmission (1996). His most recent work is a translation of 100 English poems into Dutch from the 16th to the 19th centuries in bilingual edition entitled Bestorm my Hart, (Amsterdam 2008), and a fully annotated translation of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, with an introductory essay, (Amsterdam, 2011).