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Document Details :

Title: Louis Couperus en de globalisering
Subtitle: De reizen naar Noord-Afrika en Azië
Author(s): HUIGEN, Siegfried
Journal: Spiegel der Letteren
Volume: 55    Issue: 3   Date: 2013   
Pages: 301-326
DOI: 10.2143/SDL.55.3.2990699

Abstract :
At the end of his life, Louis Couperus made two extended journeys to North Africa and Asia. During the second of these journeys he visited the Dutch East Indies (Colonial Indonesia), China and Japan. Couperus’s travelogues were first published in episodes in the Dutch periodical Haagsche Post en later in three separate volumes, partly after his death in 1923. In this article these travel accounts are for the first time discussed together as a more or less coherent project of Couperus, focusing on the question to what degree his representation of the countries he visited was determined by an imaginative geography which he had constructed on the basis of texts, images and visits to exhibitions. His concept of a confrontation between a destructive Western Modernity and traditional ‘Oriental’ societies will appear to take a central place, without Couperus being able to free himself from a position as an accomplice in this conflict.

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