Literary Landscape

Rita Baleiro (ESGHT – University of the Algarve, CiTUR, Portugal)

The late nineteenth-century European concept of landscape attempts to sustain pre-capitalist views of human relations with nature and the land, in contrast to the capitalist economic order’s conception (Cosgrove, 1988, p. 252). In this view, the landscape becomes a spectacle to be appreciated, transforming into something perceived from the person’s intimate subjectivity, and the person’s activity is the very condition of its existence. The landscape is beyond functional usage and should be understood from a phenomenological perspective (Berque, 1994; Collot, 2005). The aesthetic arts, namely painting and literature, have been the first to provide testimonies of the sensory experiences of the subject’s new attitude and position towards the world’s natural beauty. Thus, the landscape is framed within a subject’s point of view, and the subject’s gaze may be steered by literary texts and information about the writers’ biographies. After that mediation, the construct of literary landscape emerges as the product of the individual’s experience of physical geography, informed by their knowledge of the literary. These intersections are possible because literary texts are “files of representation” that can shift the subject’s gaze and lend new meaning to spaces (Rojek & Urry, 1997, p. 53). They can potentially alter the perception, interpretation and narrative of the space. From this angle, the literary landscape entails dragging representational literary elements (even symbolic ones) from these ‘files’ into what is observed, creating a new value for what is seen. This process entails re-signifying space and constitutes an act of “co-creation,” as the literary landscape emerges only after the subject’s literary-filtered interaction with the place. At this point, it is helpful to draw a parallel to reader-response criticism (cf. Rosenblatt, 1978), which focuses on the individual reaction and interpretation of the black marks on the page. Only after this process, lived by each reader, is the literary text produced; i.e., the reader assigns it sufficient meaning based on what they read in the text, their previous knowledge of literature, their cultural references, ideologies, mood, and personal experiences. In this view, a text is an event resulting from the interaction between the words on the page and a reader’s perspective. Likewise, the literary landscape is an event produced after intersecting the subject’s literary references with the elements in the space. In this regard, the literary landscape is a mental perception framed by a subject’s knowledge of the literary, a process that involves memory and materiality. Concerning this process, in A Writer’s Britain (2009), Margaret Drabble states that it is improbable not to “see certain landscapes through the eyes of the writers that discovered them” (p. 7) as the writers’ creative memory is embedded in the materiality of the sites.

In the context of tourism, however, not all visitors carry the literary “luggage” needed to interpret the literary references in a given space. Hence, considering that a landscape is experienced and produced by each person uniquely, to ensure a larger number of people can experience and create the literary landscape, the tourism industry steers its gaze and re-signifies the space by signalling literary markers or through storytelling. This means that the tourism industry may often signal literary places that make up the landscape. These literary places may be of two types: real-life and imagined (Smith, 2003). The former is associated with tangible heritage sites (e.g., the author’s birthplace, tomb, or museum), and the latter comprises fictional locations associated with literary works and at least partially fictional places, as many literary texts depart from real geographic references (e.g., the Lake District).

The literary landscape may also be defined as a third space between physical geography and the representations of space that the subject carries or creates in their mind. It is a construct that compiles the concrete and the abstract, the real and the imagined, the memory and the stories they have read or heard about, and it coincides with the subject’s gaze. This “constant and reciprocal interaction of representation and experience suggests place not only as a location but also as process.” (Weston, 2016, p. 15), a view of the recent so-called spatial turn in the humanities that challenges Yi- Fu Tuan’s perspective of immobility of place (i.e., space is movement and place is a pause) (1977, p.6). After the spatial turn, the landscape becomes a verb (a process) rather than a noun (a place).

The literary landscape implicates the outcome of the subjective perception of the objective within an unreliable and unstable system: the language system. If, as Tuan claims, the act of interpretation always implies personal interpretation, it is crucial to understand that the language used to describe and interpret landscape conditions its perception. This view brings the matter of literary geography to the discussion, as this “process of reading and interpreting literary texts by reference to geographical concepts” (Thacker, 2005, p.60), i.e., mapping the literary texts’ topographical and geographical references (i.e., the literary places), is always conditioned by the uncertainty of language.

In short, when addressing the concept of literary landscape, the subjects’ role cannot be omitted from the process of co-creating this construct. Indeed, individuals do not passively consume the meaning presented to them in that space; instead, they actively construct the meaning they find there.  

            Within literary theory and literary studies, the term “landscape” may also refer to a category of representation of the physical setting in literary texts. In literary texts, the landscape is a structure of meaning that sustains the actions and thoughts and a referent that opens the literary text to the outside world. In literary texts, the landscape might tell stories; it may also be a subject of writing, as in ecocriticism, which began analysing how literary works depict nature, seeking the intersection of literary studies and environmental discourse to address issues of environmental justice and degraded landscapes.

How to cite this dictionary entry: Baleiro, R. (2023). Literary landscape. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.). E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia.

References

Berque, A. (1994) (Ed). Cinq propositions pour une théorie du paysage. Champ Vallon.

Drabble, M. (2009). A writer’s Britain. Thames & Hudson.

Collot, M. (2005). Paysage et poésie: Du romantisme à nos jours. José Corti.

Cosgrove, D. E. (1988). Social formation and symbolic landscape. Barnes and Noble Books.

Rojek C. & J. Urry (Eds.) (1997). Touring cultures: Transformations of travel and theory. Routledge.

Rosenblatt, L.M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Southern Illinois University Press.

Smith, K.A. (2003). Literary enthusiasts as visitors and volunteers. International Journal of Tourism Research, 5(2), 83-95. https://doi.org/10.1002/JTR.419

Thacker, A. (2005). The idea of critical literary geography. New Formations, 57, 56–73.

Tuan, Y-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

Weston, D. (2016). Contemporary literary landscapes. The poetics of experience. Routledge.