La visione delle città delle Fiandre negli scrittori fiamminghi di lingua francese (1881-1922)

This research aims to investigate the vision of the cities of Flanders, given by writers who belong to the same region but, for cultural reasons, wrote in a different language such as French. This language was the used language of the culture in the period that we analyzed, which is the great revival of Belgian literature of the 1880s up to the beginning of the First World War. This temporal distinction is due to the partial, but steady decline in the use of the French language by Flemish writers, and above all to a radical change of the thematic references by those writers who lived in a brutally occupied territory. It is necessary to present more precisely the corpus of the writers chosen for the proposed investigation. We analyzed different works by Georges Eekhoud, Max Elskamp, Camille Lemonnier, Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren. Cities involved in our analysis are the main cities of Flanders: Bruges, Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Leuven and Furnes. Our attention is focused on the cities of Bruges and Antwerp above all, because of their main presence in the Belgian literature in authors like Georges Rodenbach and Georges Eekhoud. They dedicated their entire works to these cities instead of offering precedence to cities like Ghent, Brussels, Leuven and Furnes which are regarded as young sisters cities to Bruges and Antwerp. We aim to analyze how these cities were seen by the writers chosen, which kind of relationship they have to each other and what role these cities play in the poetics of each author.