Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

upward to the mouth of the volcanic crater that delivers the Lidenbrock expedition back to the world above ground amid an eruption of liquid rock is portrayed as a metaphorical rebirth that will in the end enable Axel to return home and marry the woman he has desired from the beginning of the novel. The superbly intelligent but stubborn and narrow-minded Lidenbrock, with his iron determination and implacable leadership, and the Icelandic guide Hans, with his loyalty, courage, and stoic acceptance of hardships and deprivations, serve as two different models of masculinity in relation to which Axel has to define his own identity—without, of course, merely becoming a replica of either.
    What makes Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth such a complex, fascinating, and influential work of literature, then, is its distinctive combination of the most advanced science of its day with more speculative approaches to knowledge and literary figures and plots that have had a long tradition and far-reaching influence in the Western tradition. This combination is characteristic of many of Verne’s works. He developed this hallmark brand of narrative after studying law and spending his early years as an unsuccessful playwright—a dramatic legacy that is still obvious in the extended, skillfully handled dialogues between Lidenbrock and his nephew in Journey to the Center of the Earth. Verne is remembered principally as one of the two nineteenth-century fathers of the science-fiction genre, along with the British author H. G. Wells—even though we should keep in mind that the term “science fiction” did not exist in Verne’s and Wells’s day. The term was coined in the 1920s, in the United States. The kind of novel Verne and Wells wrote in Europe in the late nineteenth century would have been called “scientific romance.”
    Yet, in many ways, Verne’s novels are quite unlike the genre that evolved out of his work in the twentieth century. While much twentieth-century science fiction focuses on the exploration of outer space, Verne wrote only two novels that take his characters away from the Earth, on trips to the moon. With few exceptions, the plots of his novels are set in the present or recent past rather than in the future— Journey is set in the resolutely contemporary year of 1863. (One of the exceptions to this rule is Paris in the Twentieth Century, a text that was long lost but then rediscovered in the 1980s and finally published in 1994). And while many Verne novels explore human interaction with technology and machines, not all of them do, and some are more focused on scientific knowledge itself rather than on the technological apparatus that dominates so much science fiction after him. The kind of technology that appears in Verne’s novels, at any rate, is generally based on that of his own day, with little or no projection into the future.
    But Verne’s novels do create alternative worlds, some of them entirely imaginary even though they are set in remote parts of our own very real planet, and his protagonists explore them with some of the tools of modern science and technology. For a nineteenth-century reader, Verne’s narratives would have had clear affinities with other romances of adventure, as well as with certain kinds of travel writing—they may have seemed only a step or two beyond the strange tales of faraway lands and different cultures that colonial officers, explorers, traders, and adventurers brought back to Europe. Modern literary scholars often associate Verne’s writings with those of other novelists who combined adventure stories with issues of science and technology, such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. G. Wells. Verne himself gave his novels the general title Voyages extraordinaires: Les mondes connus et inconnus (Extraordinary Journeys: Known and Unknown Worlds). In an age of colonial expansion and geographical exploration all over the world, the blank spaces on Europeans’