Modernist Circumnavigations: Around the World in Jules Verne's Wake

by Kevin Riordan

Overview

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 500^th anniversary of the first circumnavigation and the 150^th 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030962432
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	05/29/2022
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Kevin Riordan is Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research interests include modernism, world literature, and theatre and performance studies, and his recent articles have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Performance Research, and American Studies. Riordan was a 2018 Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, and he is a co-founder of the Modernist Studies in Asia research network.

Table of Contents

1 A Circuitous Way of Making Sense of the World

Part One: Scripting the Itinerary

2 Describing a Circumference: Jules’s Verne’s Guidebook for the Modern World

3 The Portable Printing Press: Jules Verne as World Literature

Part Two: Committing Circumnavigation to Print

4 The New York World and the Cosmopolitan: Print Nationalism, Circumnavigation, and the Literary Imagination

5 Playing Nellie Bly: On the Travel Writing of an American Girl

6 The Other Direction: Elizabeth Bisland’s Guide to Cosmopolitan Composition

Part Three: The Modernist World Stage

7 Jean Cocteau’s Around-the-World Performance: Notes on Sensation

8 A Modernist Theatrum Mundi: Orson Welles and the Theater of Attractions

9 Verne in the American Century: Circumnavigation as a Foreign Policy