| In her Ph.D. dissertation, Adelheid Ceulemans casts new light on the 19th-century Flemish poet Theodore Van Ryswyck (1811-1849). Up until now, Van Ryswyck has been considered as a popular poet, a poet from and for the people, and, more recently, as an insignificant, 19th-century poetaster. This is the communis opinio about Van Ryswyck, in both popular and scientific articles and biographies. Ceulemans states that Van Ryswyck's image of popular poet needs to be revised, and even negated: Van Ryswyck was a man of letters, a literator, more than a popular poet.;The poetic oeuvre of Van Ryswyck is studied in a contextual and textual way, using the literary theories of (i) Meizoz (posture litteraire ), (ii) Rovers ('auteursfiguur-figuurauteur') and (iii) Genette (paratexts). Ceulemans analyses, among other things, the discursive construction of a Flemish sub-national identity in Van Ryswyck's poetic oeuvre. During her research, she came upon some unknown poems of Van Ryswyck and she rediscovered the so-called Archiven van de sint-luybrecht guide [Archives of the St Luybrecht Guild]. This album (a manuscript) contains about fifty erotic-pornographic texts, from the members of the St Luybrecht Guild, among whom Van Ryswyck. The Luybrecht poems were obviously kept out of the collected works of the respective Luybrecht members.;Ceulemans negates the image of Van Ryswyck as a nonchalant and ignorant poetaster. The content and style of his poems, the primary readership of his oeuvre, his pragmatism in developing a literary career (networking), and also biographical data---regarding his mythical poverty---clearly show that Van Ryswyck was not in the least a poet from or for the poor, mostly analphabetic people. Furthermore, Ceulemans situates her research concerning Van Ryswyck in a broader, international context. She comes to the conclusion that the international (especially Parisian) concept of early 19th century Bohemia applies almost simultaneously to Van Ryswyck and his fellow members of the St Luybrecht Guild and, by extension, to the Antwerp literary and artistic scene. The Luybrecht poems also fit into an international literary tendency (satiric-pornographic literature).;Van Ryswyck was not a jolly, simple poetaster who wrote for an illiterate, simple (Flemish) crowd in a literary space, which could not measure up with international cultural developments. This conclusion does not only rectify the image of Van Ryswyck, but also the conceited cliches and condescending attitude with regard to 19th-century Flemish literature. |
