Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the category “Flemish” was largely considered provincial to use it was to obstruct the cultural emancipation Flanders needed. The habit of classing literature from Flanders as “Flemish” is, however, only very recent and still controversial. Towards autonomyįlanders has a tradition of vernacular prose-writing going back to the Middle Ages. At the same time, recent Flemish prose clearly shows that by opening up to worldly reality it has received new impetus. For reasons I would like to explain, this re-historicizing and re-politicizing turn at the globalized, post-national level corresponded closely with Flemish literature’s gradual development towards becoming more self-consciously Flemish. If a metaphorical approach to this moment of literal horror is permissible, then the world found itself once again caught up in struggle over the course of history. As a matter of fact, its renaissance seems to have coincided with the moment Fukuyama’s notion of the “end of history” (and hence a particularly neoliberal type of postmodernity) collapsed: 9/11. Flemish literature has entered the twenty-first century and the world shall know it.
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