Un carrefour des voyages extraordinaires

The text of a highly eccentric piece of Jules Verne, the Voyage à travers l’impossible, has remained unpublished for a hundred years. With 97 representations in Paris, the work had no remarkable success and was largely forgotten afterwards. Written in collaboration with the dramatist Adolphe d’Ennery, just at the same time as Verne was writing the Voyages extraordinaires, it constitutes a curious metatextual document which, for its fantastic character, calls in to question the seriousness of Verne’s cycle of novels and draws on the works of German romantic E.T.A. Hoffmann. The article tends to show how Verne - by intertextual references to some of his most popular works - remains aloof of the scientist ideology claimed by his editor and which has been attributed to Verne during his lifetime by his readers