Peripheral Networks: Canon-Formation in the Nineteenth-Century Reception of Regionalist Writers

In many histories of nineteenth-century literature of the Low Countries, only a handful of authors are associated with emerging genres of regional fiction such as the village tale. In view of the immense popularity of regional literature, these histories overlook a large part of the literary field. This article aims to provide complementary perspectives by looking at how nineteenth-century Dutch and Flemish regional literature was framed and understood in contemporary reception, by systematically tracing all mentions of other artists and authors in reviews of selected authors. This has resulted in a ‘co-mention network’, revealing associations contemporary reviewers made between Dutch and Flemish regionalist writers and other cultural figures. This network functions as a starting point for investigating the impact of genre, gender and nationality on associations between authors, while also attending to which connections are not made, and which authors are left out of dominant narratives. Network analysis suggests that genre boundaries were fluid, and that numerous transnational authors were associated with Dutch and Flemish regionalists. At times nuancing or amending existing accounts of regionalism in literary histories, this article is also a tentative investigation of processes of canon-formation more broadly.