The aim of this thesis is to bring light to the complex relationship between the “body” of the traveller and that of the writer, but also the “corpus” of literary work, in so far as we deal with several travel writers in the Far East from the 19th and 20th centuries. It consists of the works of Segalen, Claudel, Loti, Michaux and David-Néel. Their reflections relate at once to oriental ideograms and the “alternative” religions of the Far East (Tibet, China, Japan), notably Taoism and Buddhism, and, in parallel, to confrontations with the otherness of the “body”.For our problematic of literary space we propose three principal axes, which divide the thesis into three parts, analysing the textual space, the “transcendent” space and then the “interior” space.The interest of this work on the “body” under the exotic gaze is measured against the notion of literary space, which is evaluated in an individual process specific to each of the authors
