Het prozagedicht in Vlaanderen en Nederland als model. Over genres en generaties

The genre of the prose poem can act as a model: one the one hand, it is an abstract set of characteristics in the head of the reader, continuously renewing itself; on the other hand, it functions as a productive model for new texts. How the genre as a model generated new texts in the period before World War I, is demonstrated with the case of Pol de Mont and Ellen Corr. The first modified the model that he found in the Eighties movement and acted as a productive model for an epigone like Corr. In the period before the war, the prose poem appeared to be a 'Generationsgattung', a genre that first was carried by a generation (born, roughly, between 1855 and 1870) and then passed on to the authors who made their debut in the nineties (the so-called Nineties movement and 'Van Nu en Straks' movement). The authors of the Nineties movement appear to be tributary of the prose poem of the Eighties movement and only shortly before World War I contributed to the prose poem. With a second case, Herman Heijermans and Constant van Wessem, we show how the genre after World War I, in a modified form, became productive again. The generation of 1920, from the Dutch interbellum, of which Van Wessem was one of the leaders, renews the prose poem with modern elements such as cinematic processes and a businesslike, objective rendering. Once again, a topos, the café, acts as a part of that model that is unfamiliar to the genre. In that way, we show in each case how the prose poem functions as model for a generation, but also how the model goes beyond the genre, because of the fact that it passes non-inherent elements such as topoi, synchronically as well as diachronically.