Shaping “Belgian” Literature before 1830: Multilingual Patterns and Cultural Transfer in Flemish and French Periodicals in the Southern Low Countries

If still largely underexplored, proto-Belgian 18th-century literature in turn has to date mainly been described from a nation-state, monolinguistic perspective. The present project aims to broaden this perspective by investigating the extent to which proto-Belgian literature was subject to transcultural influences, as well as how it was in turn actively involved in the process of European literary exchange. The specific focus of the project will lie on a corpus of periodicals, which have indeed become a privileged object of research of transcultural studies/history. The overall objective of the project is twofold. On the one hand, the project aims to offer a new perspective on 18th-century literature by adopting a transcultural, dynamic and transdisciplinary approach to a specific corpus of Belgian literary journals, with multilingualism and transdisciplinarity as central parameters. On the other hand, we aim to fill a crucial gap in the literary historiography of the Southern Low Countries: the very same corpus will shed new light on authors and works that have never been studied before.