Jules Verne and the Discovery of the
Natural World
Tim Unwin
Abstract: This chapter explores the elemental forces at work in
Verne’s vast series of Voyages extraordinaires. It reveals the extent to
which the author’s representation of nature’s extreme environments
reflected a contemporary literary preoccupation with the pedagogical
exposition of new geographical, anthropological, geological, zoological, botanical and technological knowledge, and the stylistic processes of linguistic accumulation, appropriation and assimilation used
to achieve this.
Few fictional undertakings are as ambitious or as wide-ranging as
Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires. Few are so quintessentially of
their time. In mapping out the nineteenth century’s new understanding
of the globe and its relationship with it, Verne gives a uniquely valuable insight not only into the state of science and technology, but also
of the discovery of the natural world that modern progress has enabled. Throughout his colossal enterprise Verne aims to provide systematic and comprehensive coverage of the globe, while also putting
together a compendium of current knowledge about it through the
texts and documents he so conspicuously uses in the making of his
stories. Perhaps inevitably, the aim of totality itself turns out to be a
vast fiction. However Verne, in the encyclopaedic spirit of his time,
manages to offer an astonishingly wide-ranging view of the century’s
discoveries and developments: geographical, anthropological, geological, zoological, botanical, technological and so on. In terms of
geographical coverage, he maps out the continents, the seas and the
polar regions, returning obsessively to key points of the globe in sev-