Small Nations Writ Large: Notions of Cosmopolitanism in Fin-de-Siècle Scotland and Flanders

Abstract

Compares relations between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in Scotland and Belgium, through the Scottish critic William Sharp's response to the "Belgian Renascence," to the magazine La Jeune Belgique, to Flemish authors writing in French (notably the playwrights Van Lerberghe and Maeterlinck, the novelist Eekhoud, and the poet Verhaeren), contrasting that movement with the later pro-Dutch-language magazine Van Nu en Straks, and illustrating how the local and global overlapped in the rivalling cosmopolitanism of fin-de-siècle Belgium and the late-19th-century avant-garde.