‘ FROM NOW ON WE SPEAK CIVILIZED DUTCH’ 265 Language and Literature 2009 18(3) ‘From now on we speak civilized Dutch’: the authors of Flanders, the language of the Netherlands, and the readers of A. Manteau Kevin Absillis, University of Antwerp, The Netherlands Abstract Subjugated to the linguistic and literary norms of the Netherlands and, at the same time, confined to the borders of the multilingual state of Belgium, Flemish authors have always had to struggle hard to legitimize their cultural identity. After the Second World War, however, Flemish literature suffered due to the fact that a small but prominent part of the Flemish Movement had collaborated with the German occupiers. Publishers therefore had to explore new ways in which to turn Flemish literature into a commercially and artistically successful commodity in Flanders and the Netherlands. Introducing a theoretical framework that was conceived of by Pierre Bourdieu and further elaborated on by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters, this article will discuss and interpret the ways in which Flemish publishers have edited, designed, and marketed literary texts, and explore the positive and negative effects which strategies of assimilation and differentiation have had on the reception of those texts. The reading practices engaged in by literary gatekeepers, both in Belgium and in the Netherlands, are shown to have been a profoundly influential force in the history of Flemish literature. Keywords: Bourdieu, Pierre; Casanova, Pascale; Claus, Hugo; Conscience, Hendrik; Dutch; Flemish; Flemish literature; history of publishing; history of reading; language ideology; textual editing I Towards a theory of world literary space In 1985 Pierre Bourdieu devoted a concise article to the question ‘Does a Belgian literature exist?’ (Bourdieu, 1985). It is hard to avoid the impression that the issue mainly served the French sociologist as a pretext to almost playfully test the boundaries of his theory of fields, or, to put it more accurately, to investigate the relationship between language, national identity and the concept of the literary field as ‘an independent social universe with its own laws of functioning, its specific relations of force, its dominant and its dominated’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 163). To begin with Bourdieu focuses on Belgian literature as if it were a Francophone affair, whereas Belgium has a Dutch-speaking community that has outnumbered the French-speaking community since 1830 and can even boast a minority of German-speaking inhabitants living within its borders since the Treaty of Versailles. Bourdieu’s attempt to tackle the question also suffers Language and Literature Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC), Vol 18(3): 265–280 DOI: 10.1177/0963947009105853 www.sagepublications.com A RTICLE 265-280 LAL_105853.indd 265 265-280 LAL_105853.indd 265 5/15/2009 12:37:34 PM 5/15/2009 12:37:34 PM Process Black Process Black