The Low Countries on the Road. Travel Writing in Flanders and the Netherlands

Cees Nooteboom is a pioneer of Dutch travel writing who breathed new life into the genre in the 1980s. He opened the way for a flood of Dutch travel writing. Serious anthropologists, well-read mountaineers, inspired journalists, seasoned men and women of letters and even poets: they all threw themselves into the literary travelogue. The boundaries between literature and journalism became blurred; or more accurately, the two fields began to merge. Writers ventured into factual observation, while journalists began to produce finer sentences with more introspection than they had even been allowed to write for a newspaper. Nonetheless, the genre remains fluid, without strictly defined boundanies.