CHARLES DE COSTER (1847-74)

Belgian novelist, writing in French, who stimulated Belgian national consciousness and prepared the ground for an original native literature.

He lived most of his life in poverty and obscurity and took 10 years to write his masterpiece La Légende et les aventures héroïques, joyeuses, et glorieuses d´Ulenspiegel et fe Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flanders et ailleurs (1866; The Glorious Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegl). Freely adapting the traditional tales of the folk heroes Till Eulenspiegel and Lamme, he set his story in the 16th century, at the height of the Inquisition; the hero´s father is burned at the stake as a heretic, and Ulenspiegel swears an oath to avenge him. De Coster presents his characters as combining heroic qualities with a typically Belgian realism. The style is highly coloured and archaistic, being derived from Rabelais, from Montaigne and from the 16th-century chroniclers. With its theme of resistance against oppression, the book has been called "the Bible of Flanders" and "the breviary of freedom"; yet neither the gruesome death scenes and the shrieks of the tortured, nor, on the other hand, a cetain tendency to philosophize, prevent its being, as the author describes it, "a merry, jovial book, a work of art and of literature".

The contrast between La Légende and the commonplace novels of the period is sharp and striking.