Historiographie de la littérature belge

The literary production in Belgium has always been the subject of much debate, about how to write its history and how to theorize its development. The present anthology brings together the key texts of these debates, from 1870 to the present times, and casts a light on the many geographical, terminological, chronological and axiological options which affected the apprehension of the corpus.
Each of the selected texts is presented by a short note on its author(s). The anthology offers also a rich introduction, in which the authors discuss the following topic: how the rhetorics of literary history in Belgium produce various theoretical experimentations about literature in general?
The texts are presented following a chronological order, but are also assembled in four periods, related to four ways of theoretical experimentation: building history, writing language, living society, thinking concepts.