Insiders’ Landscapes in John Ruskin and Marcel Proust

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article explores John Ruskin's legacy in Marcel Proust's literary production through the lens of phenomenological interpretations of place and landscape in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural geography. In both authors, landscape is integrated with a subjective geography; nevertheless, while Ruskin absorbs objective topography into a personal narrative, Proust's sense of communality allows his landscapes to transcend the dimension of a mere solipsism. Finally, the exploration of Ruskin's and Proust's landscape writing testifies to a spatial shift based on the increased awareness of the fracture between the self and the world in modernist literature.