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Document Details :

Title: 'De drommen der menigte-in-de-vlakte'
Subtitle: Maurice Gilliams en de modernisering van Vlaanderen
Author(s): DE CEUSTER, Filip
Journal: Spiegel der Letteren
Volume: 55    Issue: 4   Date: 2013   
Pages: 459-492
DOI: 10.2143/SDL.55.4.2999873

Abstract :
This article presents a significant rethinking of scholarly attitudes towards the Antwerp writer Maurice Gilliams (1900-1982). It questions Gilliams’s image as a solely perfection-seeking producer of rather autonomous, aesthetic artefacts, by situating his writer ship in a literary-institutional and socio-cultural context in which the Flemish Movement and the modernisation of Flemish society play a prominent role. A broad intertextual reading of mainly Elias of het gevecht met de nachtegalen (‘Elias or the struggle with the nightingales’) and Gregoria of een huwelijk op Elseneur (‘Gregoria or a Marriage on Elsinore’) demonstrates how these texts can be linked to the extra-literary reality, which in this case is made exploitable via the contemporary discourses about the transformation of the Antwerp left river shore.

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