Imaginary voyage
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Imaginary voyage is a narrative genre which presents fictious locations in the form of a travel narrative, but has no generally agreed-upon definition.[1] It has been subdivided into fantastic voyages and realistic voyages depending on the prominence of "marvelous or supernatural elements".[1]: 104–105 It can be a utopian or satirical representation put into a fictional frame of travel account.[2][1] It has been regarded as a predecessor of science fiction.[3][4]
It is a very archaic narrative technique preceding romance and novelistic forms. Two known examples from Greek literature are Euhemerus' Sacred History and Iambulus’ Islands of the Sun.[5] Their utopian islands are apparently modeled from mythological Fortunate Isles.
Lucian's True History parodizes the whole genre of imaginary voyage, and in his foreword Lucian cites Iambulus as one of objects of parody.[5] Photius states though in his Bibliotheca that its main object was Antonius Diogenes' The incredible wonders beyond Thule, a genre blending of fantastic voyage and Greek romance which popularized Pythagorean teachings.
The spread of exotic travel writing in the medieval West in the 13th century, created a niche for fantastic tales of imaginary voyages presented as real autobiographical accounts. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1357) and the Itinerarius of Johannes Witte de Hese (c. 1400) are representative of this late medieval tendency.
The first to revive this form in the Modern era was Thomas More in his Utopia (1515), to be followed a century later by proliferation of utopian islands: Johannes Valentinus Andreae's Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (1619), Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1623), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Jacob Bidermann's Utopia (1640), Denis Vairasse' The history of the Sevarambi (1675), Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre australe connue (1676), Gabriel Daniel's Voyage du monde de Descartes (1690), François Lefebvre's Relation du voyage de l’isle d’Eutopie (1711), as well as many others.
Lucian's satirical line was exploited by François Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) and developed later on in Joseph Hall's Mundus Alter et Idem (1607), François Hédelin's Histoire du temps (1654), Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire comique contenant les États et Empires de la Lune (1657) and Fragments d’histoire comique contenant les États et Empires du Soleil (1662),[6] Charles Sorel's Nouvelle Découverte du Royaume de Frisquemore (1662), Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666), Joshua Barnes' Gerania (1675), Bernard de Fontenelle's Relation de l’île de Bornéo (1686), Daniel Defoe's The Consolidator (1705), and most notably in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726).
Imaginary voyage has become a natural medium for promoting new astronomic ideas. First literary space flights after Lucian were: Juan Maldonado's Somnium (1541), Johann Kepler's Somnium (1634), Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), John Wilkins' The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), Athanasius Kircher's Itinerarium extaticum (1656), David Russen's Iter lunare (1703), Diego de Torres Villarroel's Viaje fantástico (1723), Eberhard Kindermann's Die geschwinde Reise auf dem Luftschiff nach der obern Welt (1744) – the first flight to planets, Robert Paltock's The life and adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), Voltaire's Micromégas (1752).
Literature
- ^ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Gove, Philip Babcock. The Imaginary Voyage in Prose: Fiction - A History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study, With an Annotated Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800, Columbia University Press, 1941.
- ^ Derrick Moors. Imaginary Voyages
- ^ Stableford, Brian M. (2004). "Imaginary Voyages". Historical dictionary of science fiction literature. Scarecrow Press. p. 170. ISBN 9780810849389.
- ^ Fantastic voyage, in: Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. by John Clute, 1993
- ^ 5.0 5.1 David Winston. Iambulus' Islands of the Sun and Hellenistic Literary Utopias, in: Science Fiction Studies #10 = Volume 3, Part 3 = November 1976
- ^ Cyrano de Bergerac, in: Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. by John Clute, 1993
- David Winston. Iambulus’ Islands of the Sun and Hellenistic Literary Utopias, in: Science Fiction Studies #10 = Volume 3, Part 3 = November 1976