Randstad: een Nederlands-Vlaamse alliantie

The periodical Randstad was edited by two Flemish and two Dutch literary authors. The current picture of this periodical is that it has been without any structure. This image is grounded, among other things, on the fact that contributors to Randstad did not contribute regularly and that attention was given to widely divergent art forms and genres, to fictive as well as to non-fictive texts and, above all, to international, especially French and American, artistic and political manifestations. Analysis of the implicit poetics, however, shows that Randstad was more coherent than it seemed to be at first sight. The Dutch and Flemish editors particularly paid attention to cultural phenomena which were characterized by experimental and / or social engagement, whatever the country of origin of these phenomena was: the Netherlands or Belgium, France or the United States.