The Landscape in French Literature since the Nineteenth Century and its relationship with painting

Abstract

This article explores the values of landscape as seen in French literature since the nineteenth century and its connexion with painting in the same period. Both, the rural landscape presented by British and German artists and urban landscapes that radically changed since the industrial revolution, offer symbolic and social dimensions that are projected on to the literary and artistic fields. Nineteenth century French society experimented great political and sociological changes that had repercussions in literature from the Renaissance to post-modern rethinks. The nineteenth century is the greatest period of French literature, the most relevant writers, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Hugo, Balzac spent time in the contemplation of the landscape and created new relationships and correspondences with nature. The recovery of spaces and their polisemy also applies to the whole of the twentieth century and the current period. Poets, writers and painters continue to integrate the landscape in their creations. As Fernand Braudel once said, landscapes and spaces are not only realities of the present time but also and above all, survivors of the past; «la terre est, comme notre peau, condamnée à conserver la trace des blessures anciennes».