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Document Details : Title: Bouwstenen voor een natie in de steigers Subtitle: De mise-en-scene van het verleden in P.J. Heuvelmans' De twee reizigers (1843) Author(s): BEMONG, Nele Journal: Spiegel der Letteren Volume: 50 Issue: 3 Date: 2008 Pages: 269-295 DOI: 10.2143/SDL.50.3.2033475 Abstract : De twee reizigers can in many ways be regarded as a curious example of historical fictional prose from the first two decades after Belgian independence. Whereas other Belgian historical novels were primarily concerned with defining a homogeneous national identity, thus helping to legitimate independence, Heuvelmans’s work highlights precisely the heterogeneous plurality of histories of the ‘fatherland’ that was established during the Protocol of London. Heuvelmans’s principal aim was to make his compatriots acquainted with the history of one of the lesser known regions of this new nation state. This article investigates how the use of characters and the narrative communication situation help to realize this didactic function within a chronotope that can be characterized as documentary and that permeates space with historicity. A correct understanding of the past, so the text argues, can only be imparted in the essential connection of that past and the space in which it occurred. |
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