ABSTRACT
The Avignon Festival of 2005, with Jan Fabre — a Flemish plastic artist and playwright — as the associated artist, invited by Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller, provoked much comment. Maurice Maeterlinck, another Flemish playwright, had to face objections over a century before, when the 'quarrel of cosmopolitanism' shook French intellectual circles, causing a confrontation between nationalists and cosmopolitans over the subject of foreign influences on the national tradition. With the acceleration that literary life in Belgium underwent in the years of the century, Flemish painting continued to have a strong appeal in terms of identity, notably where the development of the 'nordic myth' was concerned, a myth propounded by numerous members of the naturalist movement, such as Maurice Maeterlinck, Emile Verhaeren or Charles Van Lerberghe. At the end of the century in Belgium, poetry had indeed reached the summit of the literary hierarchy, as was the case in France with the development of the Parnassian and Symbolist movements.
