Jules Verne
Biography
Jules Verne was a French novelist whose many popular novels include the classics Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864), De la Terre à la Lune (1965) and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873). While studying law, Verne wrote plays and librettos, but soon turned to writing novels full-time. He wrote dozens of books in his career and became the world-famous and wealthy author of adventures that are still in print today, including In Search of the Castaways (1868), L'Île mystérieuse (1874) and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870).
Many of Verne's works became familiar to movie audiences, thanks to movie versions produced by Walt Disney's studios. French novelist, originator of modern science fiction. After completing his studies at the Nantes lycée, he went to Paris to study law. He early became interested in the theater and wrote (1848–50) librettos for operettas. For some years his concerns alternated between business and the theater, but after 1863 he drew upon his interest in science and geography to write a series of romances of extraordinary journeys, in which he anticipated, with remarkable foresight, many scientific and technological achievements of the 20th Century.
Verne is especially known to English readers in translations of his Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), The Mysterious Island (1875), and Michael Strogoff (1876).
Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, and Hugo Gernsback.
Links
Le Tour du monde en 80 jours de Phileas Fogg website
Mary Shelley and the Birth of Science Fiction
The Index Translationum is UNESCO's database of book translations. Books have been translated for thousands of years, with no central record of the fact. The League of Nations established a record of translations in 1932. In 1946, the United Nations superseded the League and UNESCO was assigned the Index. In 1979, the records were computerized.
Librivox MP3s of Jules Verne
Annotated bibliography with summaries of Verne's works
Wiki source Jules Verne's books in French, English, Chinese...
Martin Scorsese 2011 movie Hugo with Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, and Christopher Lee. Based on Brian Selznick's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it tells the story of a boy who lives alone in the Gare Montparnasse railway station in Paris in the 1930s. Tells the story of Georges Méliès, French illusionist and film director, father of special effects in movies, who notably made a famous version of Jules Verne's A Trip to the Moon color version (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902).
Complete text in English and French of Le Tour du monde
Documents for the class
Le Tour du monde, simplified version with drawings in French PDF
Documents to study for the final exam:
Jules Verne PPT
Le Tour du monde en 80 jours 1
Le Tour du monde en 80 jours 2
Le Tour du monde en 80 jours 3
Le Tour du monde en 80 jours 4
Le Tour du monde en 80 jours, extract chapter 12
Info: Suez Canal 蘇伊士運河 Le canal de Suez. L'épopée de la construction du canal de Suez
Whist: British card game played by Fogg.
The Reform Club: private members' club on the south side of Pall Mall in central London, founded in 1836 (Arthur Conan Doyle, Andrew Carnegie, and H. G. Wells were members).
Calcutta: 加爾各答 Kolkata，舊名Calcutta. The city, nicknamed the "City of Joy" is widely regarded as the "cultural capital" of India and as of 2019, 6 Nobel Laureates have been associated with the city. The Port of Kolkata, established in 1870, is India's oldest and only major river port.
Yokohama: second largest city in Japan by population, and the most populous municipality of Japan; Yokohama developed rapidly as Japan's prominent port city following the end of Japan's relative isolation in the mid-19th century.
Meiji Era: (明治 L'ère Meiji) era of Japanese history which extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. This era represents the first half of the Empire of Japan, during which period the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonisation by European powers to the new paradigm of a modern, industrialised nationstate and emergent great power, influenced by Western scientific, technological, philosophical, political, legal, and aesthetic ideas.
Tengu: The tengu (天狗) in art appears in a variety of shapes. It usually falls somewhere between a large, monstrous bird and a wholly anthropomorphized being, often with a red face or an unusually large or long nose. Passepartout is engaged as part of the Long Noses, or acrobats.
First travel around the world
Magellan's team the first to make a true circumnavigation
350 years before Mr. Foggs trip; in 1519 Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set out on an ocean voyage with 5 ships and a crew of 270 men. 2 years later, Magellan was killed by Philippine tribes. In fact, only 18 seamen led by Juan Sebastián Elcano would make it back, becoming the first to complete a true circumnavigation of the earth with the ship Victoria in 1522.
The trip extended over 3 years, 78,000km and reached two antipodes (two diametrically opposite places on Earth). Among the discoveries of the trip was the need of a date line and the understanding that travel around the world in Easterly direction will gain one day.
Detailed info on Around the world and here
