Lappendekens in druk: Culturele gemeenschapsvorming en de formatie van een 'Belgisch' lezerspubliek in literaire tijdschriften (1750-1800)

This dissertation, part of a larger FWO-project on proto-Belgian periodicals between 1750 and 1830, under the supervision of prof. Beatrijs Vanacker and prof. Tom Verschaffel, examines French- and Dutch-language literary journals in the Southern Netherlands between 1750 and 1800. Within my focus on literary journals, I offer no strict definition of the genre, rather using the term 'literary' in a malleable way so as to highlight the role of literature in its broadest sense, including so-called fictional strategies, in the shaping of a multilingual Belgian reading public. By privileging a bilingual corpus and a methodological perspective that takes seriously the role of cultural transfer to discursive nation-building, I analyse the relationship between literary journalism and cultural community building. From there, I determine the relative significance of three interrelated research foci: the heterogeneity of literary forms used to express collective identity, the literary journalist as a cultural mediator, and the position of the discursive reader. Taking into account the specificity of each journal and the general development of the genre, I circumscribe the rise of a journalistic field, structured around four key actors: the government, the literary journalists, the literary institutions, and the reading public. From this perspective, I trace how the second half of the eighteenth century not only witnessed the rise of the periodical press, but also how it coincided with the development of a discursive cultural space that was defined increasingly in national terms. The history of the press in the Southern Netherlands was conditioned in great part by the country's political history, as writers capitalised on the genre's (formal) malleability during four key periods for their specific ideological aims. While I identified an emergent national consciousness in these literary journals, I also stressed the negotiated nature of this identification, emphasising that it was constructed at the crossroads with (more established) literary traditions (from France, the Dutch Republic, and even England, although to a lesser extent).