Held en gevoelsgemeenschap in Lucretia van Merkens Bijbelse epos David (1767)

Abstract

In his well-known essay Theory of the Novel (1916) Georg Lukacs defends the thesis that the hero in the old epic was still entirely linked to the fate of the community that surrounds him. Only with the rise of the novel, the hero’s inner live as an individual would come to the fore, featuring his own feelings, doubts and expectations. This article investigates the relationship between hero and community in an epic poem from the eighteenth century, Lucretia of Merken’s David (1767). Contrary to what Lukacs assumes, the hero of Van Merken shows his human side of inner emotional life. David’s emotions do not just reflect the emotions of the surrounding community, but his feelings rather interfere and interact with them. This is especially true when we look at the emotions’ social dynamics that create an ‘emotional community’, a term derived from the work of emotional histories Barbara Rosenwein.