The article starts form a critical analysis of political, linguistic and cultural parameters employed in several companions to French literary history. The author then proposes the idea of 'cartography' of European literatures which should give the literary 'provinces' their due place no less than the canonized centres. The last part of the article focuses on the complex case of literatures in Belgium, which seems to elude the parameters of traditional historiography. The author feels historiography might therefore do well to start form the assumption that literatures are auto-organizing systems that produce their own parameters, among which the most prominent are norms and models, and internal hierarchical relations as well as relations with surrounding literatures. The article concludes with a brief presentation of a new historiography of Belgian literature from 1800 on.