Abstract
The present article analyses the vicissitudes of the genre of the regional or rural novel in Flanders during the past century. Notwithstanding the enormous success of the genre during the first decennia of the 20th century (with Stijn Streuvels, Felix Timmermans and Ernest Claes as its major representatives), the regional novel lost its literary prestige after the Second World War in favour of innovative modernist prose. From 1970 onwards, however, regional fiction has revived within a postmodern perspective, in the form of so-called ‘genealogical novels’. This complex poetical history is subsequently highlighted by the analysis of two novels by Hugo Claus : on the one hand the modernist, critical rewriting of regional fiction in De Metsiers (1950 ; The Duck Hunt, 1955), on the other hand the postmodern deconstruction of the genre in the recent novel De geruchten (1996 ; The Rumours)
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