ABSTRACT
In 1934, when retired headmaster Jacob Kats's Tjengkorongan kawroeh kasoesastran Djawi kapirid ing woedjoed sarta soeraosipoen (‘Sketch of the knowledge of Javanese literature according to its forms and contents’) was published in Batavia, European involvement in Javanese literature and poetics was over a century old. Government officials and missionaries had not only studied and described Javanese poetry for a European public since the late eighteenth century, from around 1840 a number among them had actually produced works of literature in Javanese. The best-known Dutch authors of Javanese texts were C. F. Winter the elder and F. L. Winter, members of a Eurasian family of government interpreters and teachers active in the court city of Surakarta in Central Java throughout the nineteenth century. Several dozens of their writings – original works, editions and compilations of older texts, translations and adaptations from Malay, Dutch, and English – were published by the Governmental Printing Press and other publishers, mainly in Batavia, from 1845 onwards, particularly for use in schools. Some were repeatedly reprinted until well into the twentieth century. Members of the Winter dynasty also acted as editors of the earliest Javanese-language periodicals, the first of which appeared in 1855. Other parts of their oeuvre exist in manuscript only. 1
