'Sketches from Flemish life'. Forms of Exemplarity and the Construction of Social Minds in Hendrik Conscience's Novels of Manners. University of Antwerp
University of Vienna, Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)
The Antwerp author Hendrik Conscience (1812-1883) went down in history as 'the man who taught his people to read'. The catchphrase not only captures the nationalist and didactic ambitions of his literature, but also his popularity among nineteenth-century readers, both in Belgium and abroad. Yet in spite of his reputation as one of the pioneers of Flemish literature, modern scholarly research on Conscience's oeuvre is scarce. We do not know, for ...