This book shows how Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days changed the global imagination. Through his novel, the world was converted into a personal itinerary, scaled to the individual traveller and, by extension, to the individual reader. Exploring Verne’s modern legacy, this study shows how subsequent generations of artists and writers took on Around the World in Eighty Days as an adaptable guidebook to the modern world. It investigates how Verne’s work leads its reader beyond the book itself. It considers Verne’s place in world literature, traces some of the many real reenactments of Verne’s itinerary, and recalls the theatrical adaptations of Verne’s story. Published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the first circumnavigation and the 150th anniversary of Verne’s novel, this book offers new insights into the largely overlooked influence of Verne on twentieth-century literature and culture and on the field of global modernism.
Author(s): Kevin Riordan
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 273
City: London
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: A Circuitous Way of Making Sense of the World
The Writing of Circumnavigation
Jules Verne Modernism and an Around-the-World Method
The Itinerary
Around and Around
Part I: Scripting the Itinerary
Chapter 2: Describing a Circumference: Jules Verne’s Guidebook for the Modern World
A Newspaper, a Wager, and a Chronotope
The Imperial Guidebook and the Logistical Novel
Fiction’s Fulfillment and the Footpath Around the World
A Matter of Perspective: Jules Verne Writes on the Globe
Chapter 3: The Portable Printing Press: Jules Verne as World Literature
Verne in the World, Verne in Translation
The Portable Printing Press and the Railway Pioneer
Reading Le Tour du monde in Allahabad
Part II: Committing Circumnavigation to Print
Chapter 4: The National Character Abroad: The New York World and The Cosmopolitan
Nellie Bly in the Pages of Mechanical Reproduction
In and Out of the Library
The Writing on the Horizon
Chapter 5: Playing Nellie Bly: On the Travel Writing of an American Girl
Playing the American Girl Abroad
The Loyalties and Apologies of an American Writer
The Afterimage of the Fastest Circumnavigation
Chapter 6: The Other Direction: Elizabeth Bisland’s Guide to Cosmopolitan Composition
Realism in Reverse: Travel Writing’s Horizons of Expectation
Cosmopolitanism at Sea: A Moving Room of One’s Own
Seeing the Elephant: On the Surprises of Home
Part III: The Modernist World Stage
Chapter 7: Jean Cocteau’s Around-the-World Performance: Notes on Sensation
This Is How the World Begins (as Theater)
Writing Ajar; or, the Practices for the Meantime
This Is How the World Ends (on the 81st Day)
Chapter 8: A Modernist Theatrum Mundi: Orson Welles and the Theater of Attractions
Verne’s Drama and the Theater of Attractions
The Instructions of Silent Film
Portals to Elsewhere: Worldmaking at the Theater’s Edges
From the Incomplete to the Impossible
Chapter 9: Verne in the American Century: Circumnavigation as a Foreign Policy
The Rise of American Circumnavigation
The First in Around-the-World Flight
Hail Noble Captain, It Is Done Again
Bibliography
Index
