Award Winner for Volume 23
The Landscape as Image of Fiction: About a Literary Knowledge
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.
This article contributes to the field of comparative literature by reexamining the category of landscape as a critical interface between literary representation, epistemology, and interdisciplinary inquiry. Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, aesthetics, and emerging ecocritical perspectives, it seeks to demonstrate how landscape operates not merely as a descriptive motif, but as a structuring form of knowledge that reflects and reshapes broader intellectual paradigms.
From the perspective of comparative literature, the article advances a transnational and transhistorical approach to literary forms. By considering landscape across different national traditions and aesthetic regimes, it highlights both shared conceptual frameworks and culturally specific inflections. In doing so, it aligns with the discipline’s foundational commitment to moving beyond national boundaries while also engaging with its equally important interdisciplinary dimension. Landscape emerges here as a particularly productive object of study, precisely because it intersects with fields such as philosophy, art history, and environmental humanities. The article thus contributes to ongoing efforts within comparative literature to redefine its scope in response to contemporary theoretical and ecological concerns.
More specifically, the article intervenes in current debates by proposing that landscape should be understood as a mode of organizing knowledge. This argument revisits the legacy of Enlightenment epistemology, in which knowledge was often conceived in terms of classification, mapping, and systematic order. Against this background, the article shows how literary representations of landscape—particularly from the Romantic period onward—participate in a reconfiguration of this epistemological model. Rather than reflecting a stable and ordered world, landscape becomes the site of a dynamic and often subjective negotiation between perception, imagination, and knowledge.
In this respect, the article also contributes to a broader reassessment of the relationship between literature and aesthetics. By foregrounding landscape as a mediating category, it underscores the ways in which literary texts engage with aesthetic theories while simultaneously transforming them. This perspective opens up new avenues for dialogue between literary studies and the history of aesthetics, and it resonates with recent developments in ecocriticism, where landscape is increasingly viewed as a key concept for understanding the cultural construction of nature.
On a more personal level, this article represents a significant stage in my intellectual trajectory. My earlier work focused on European Romanticisms, where the description of landscape played a crucial role in redefining the epistemological frameworks inherited from the Enlightenment. This initial interest gradually led me to explore the broader relationship between literature and aesthetics, with particular attention to the role of landscape as a model for thinking about artistic and cognitive processes. The present article extends these reflections by situating them within a more explicitly comparative and interdisciplinary framework.
Moreover, the article brings to fruition a long-standing line of inquiry developed over several years of teaching and research. It draws in part on a graduate seminar devoted to “literature and landscape,” in which I examined a wide range of textual practices and theoretical approaches. The decision to transform these explorations into a published work reflects both the continuity of this research interest and its evolution in response to new theoretical contexts, particularly the growing importance of environmental humanities.
In sum, the article aims to contribute to the ongoing redefinition of comparative literature by demonstrating how a traditionally aesthetic category such as landscape can serve as a critical tool for understanding the intersections of literature, knowledge, and the environment.
—Bernard Franco