Streekliteratuur in Vlaanderen en Nederland: een probleemstelling

The present article sketches the outline of an ongoing research project on regional literature in the Netherlands and Flanders during the first half of the 20(th) century. On the one hand, the many problems that arise are discussed briefly: the reluctant and later on explicitly polemical attitude of literary critics; the problematic, ambivalent profile of the genre itself; and its gradual marginalisation and even repression by literary historians. On the other hand, some implications of a new functionalist approach are formulated, which propagates a conception of the genre as a collective which needs to be investigated as a more or less autonomous register.