Before addressing the musical aspects of 17th-century Dutch prose fiction (i.e. the ‘novels’ of the time), I would like to devote some attention to the phenomenon of ‘inserted genres’ mentioned before. While studying the texts, I came across many musical references and songs, as well as many examples of other integrated genres. The regular prose sections in the novels are very often interspersed with poetry, prints and alternative prose elements such as sayings and letters, all of which share with music the fact that their presence and function in the novel have been the subject of little or no specific investigation.

In surveys of the novel and monographs on its history, the topic of inserted genres is usually not treated separately – neither with regard to individual examples nor in a general sense. One exception is the work of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who introduced the term ‘incorporated genres’ (or ‘inserted genres’) in a wide-ranging essay from 1934 to 1935, Discourse in the Novel, which is the final part of The Dialogic Imagination, his collection of four essays on the novel. Bakhtin regarded the phenomenon as an essential characteristic of the novel, a typical feature of the genre throughout the ages, noting its ubiquity: ‘The novel permits the incorporation of various genres, both artistic (inserted short stories, lyrical songs, poems, dramatic scenes, etc.) and extra-artistic (everyday, rhetorical, scholarly, religious genres and others). In principle, any genre could be included in the construction of the novel, and in fact it's difficult to find any genres that have not at some point been incorporated.’ He distinguished between ‘artistic’ and ‘extra-artistic’ genres, and also between existing (externally integrated) and new genres (invented by the writer). Moreover, his concept of ‘dialogism’ is illuminating in the context of such insertions, for it helps to explain the connections between different types of language combined in a single work by discovering the relationship among the various parts of a hybrid work.