Synopsis
A hundred years after his death, Jules Verne (1828–1905) has in the popular imagination become synonymous with prediction of the future. Yet the actual texts of Verne’s major novels (the vast series known as the Voyages extraordinaires) still remain unknown to many. The popular (and false) image of Verne as a foreteller of the future often comes not through what he actually wrote, but through films and other adaptations of his work.

This book sets out to challenge an enduring legacy of misconceptions about Jules Verne’s standing as a novelist by focusing on his innovative, experimental approach to the genre. Discussion ranges widely over Verne’s literary output, covering not only his best-known works, but also the texts of his apprenticeship years and the posthumous or more recently discovered writings. Verne emerges as a self-conscious author who ostentatiously manipulates stylistic forms and conventions. His uses of both fictional and non-fictional texts, alongside his constant examination of the presence of scientific discourses within narrative, place him firmly in the company of Flaubert and other canonical French novelists of the nineteenth century. Flamboyantly and showily ‘artificial’, Verne’s writing continually represents and problematises its own linguistic status. As an author whose central theme is travel, he symbolically re-enacts the processes of exploration in his writing style and, pushing back the frontiers of his own art, questions what the novel is or might be. The ‘writing of journeys’ becomes in every sense the ‘journey of writing’, and Verne is seen to be at the forefront of literature and its development in his own century.

256pp, 234 x 156mm, limp

Published October 2005