ABSTRACT
This article investigates the portrayal of the social and cultural consequences of disaster in Dutch rural literature during the long nineteenth century, primarily its final decades, in which fiction often emphasised the precariousness of rural existence. Following a discussion of how several regional texts represent both the emotional and economic impact of failed harvests and loss of livestock, the analysis focuses on the representation of an outbreak of rinderpest in Josef Cohen’s Ver van de menschen (1910), set in rural Overijssel. The events in the novel have a historical referent: they are based on the 1865 outbreak of rinderpest across the Netherlands. This article thus contributes to a better understanding of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary imagination of rural vulnerability and calamity, which, in turn, provides insights into dynamics of social relations in the face of disaster and into how (past) natural disasters are made meaningful (in the present).
