Based on the heuristic qualitative analysis of the corpus, using a comparative and heuristic approach, this study aims to characterize the Mediterranean poetics in the works of three authors: Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), Albert Camus (1913-1960) and Jacques Berque (1910-1995). These authors build their Mediterranean poetics on relationships they have with places, cultures and people. Poetics are analyzed through their autobiographic writings and the writings of the self and the intimate. Mediterranean poetics comprises sensitive, emotional and personal elements, comprehended from individual voices. Adopting a humanistic geography perspective highlights the meaning of places and the emotional spatial relationships that people create, ranging from topophilia to topophobia.

The aim of this thesis is to link the relational issue of humanistic and literary geography as well as geopoetics – namely the ways in which space is perceived, inhabited, and used – to an intercultural issue related to the way in which beings from different spaces and cultures think of and perceive themselves, and how they interact with otherness. By linking these two issues, we can analyze elements within the corpus that reflect the three aspects of the Denis de Rougemont’s cultural dialogue. We look for converging and diverging elements within the corpus that arise from their descriptions and practices of Mediterranean places and cultures. This cultural dialogue extends beyond the interculturality of the three writers’ lives and writings. It draws attention to the relationship with otherness, understood both as the human other (intercultural issue) and the environment, that is the geo described by the authors (geographical and ecological issue).

The issue is to examine to what extend the concept of Mediterranean poetics can show a philosophical and existential approach to interculturality and be the basis of a holistic cultural dialogue.