Abstract

Landscapes in literature have countless functions and meanings. From Shakespearean moorland to Bram Stoker’s Carpathian forest, they give fiction its atmosphere and meaning. The Romantics undoubtedly explored the landscape’s poetic dimension in particular, just as Goethe or Kleist used it to designate a space of tragedy, whereas in the English lakists or Lamartine, the lake refers to a character while characterizing the lyrical subject’s state of mind. The landscape also refers to a journey, whether in Rousseau’s reverie or Goethe’s meaning of the chronotope in his formative novel. As a representation of experience, in the Kantian sense, the literary landscape represents an apprenticeship. Whether it is the biblical tree of knowledge or the map of knowledge in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, natural space is an externalization of the human spirit. Horizontality is thus opposed to verticality, just as Deleuze opposes the seemingly disorganized image of the rhizome to the hierarchical image of knowledge represented by the tree. The evolution of literary representations of knowledge through landscape mirrors the evolution of the sciences, their specialization throughout history, but also their fragmentation, as Flaubert describes in his parody of the formative novel Bouvard et Pécuchet. Above all, the knowledge represented by the literary landscape is essentially reflexive: the first page of both Flaubert’s novel and Goethe’s Elective Affinities uses the landscape as an image of the reader’s entry into fiction.