Cultural transfer and literary culture in eighteenth-century Brussels. French journalists as cultural mediators

Abstract

ABSTRACT The eighteenth-century Southern Low Countries have long been considered a no man’s land, as a result of the continuous import of exotic flavors and foreign texts. But is a no man’s land also a wasteland? What if we looked at it differently and started focusing on the literary culture that was slowly taking shape, already during this long-neglected period, through cultural transfer and translation? This article focuses on the cultural agency and discursive self-shaping of three French journalists who took an interest in the literary culture of this somewhat obscure region – of Brussels more particularly – and contributed to its cultural scene by publishing literary periodicals: the Littérateur Belgique (1755) by Alexandre Des Essarts (1728–1803), the Journal de Bruxelles, ou Le Penseur (1766) by Jean-François Bastide (1724–1798) and finally the Journal de Bruxelles and Alexandre Robineau (1746–1823) as one of its driving forces. Beyond the micro-level of individual agency, these periodicals helped create a productive intertwinement between a focus on local literary culture on the one hand and a continuous search for inspiration in foreign models on the other.