The Country House and the Tension between Modernity and Tradition in Flemish Narrative Prose: Towards a New Reading of Maurice Gilliams

This project calls for a significant rethinking of the scholarly attitudes towards Maurice Gilliams (1900-1982). It aims to cast new light on Gilliams's image as a writer whose literary world is said to be 'disconnected from immediate current affairs or the common world of representation'. (M. de Jong) Not unlike Gilles Deleuze has convincingly argued that there is another Proust than the writer within the cork walls, this project shows, by different means, that there is another Gilliams than the perfection-seeking producer of autonomous aesthetic objects. It will become apparent that Gilliams can be situated in a context in which the Flemish Movement plays a prominent role and the autonomist poetics are less evident than in e.g. France or England. In order to situate Gilliams within a broader literary history, the author will be compared with English novelist and social critic E.M. Forster (1879-1970). The literary topos of the country house, which in this research is key, is a prominent feature in both Gilliams's and Forster's work. Although Forster was, unlike Gilliams, blessed with a higher education and a family that had all the gravitas and social influence Gilliams's lacked, both writers cultivated an image of 'aristocrat of the mind'. Therefore, this project questions Gilliams's elitist status. For what did it actually mean to be a writer of highly stylized Flemish fiction in an emancipating Flanders, when one belonged to the Flemish-speaking middle class?

Keywords:FLEMISH LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies