A floating city
A floating city is a novel by the French author Jules Verne about a boat trip.
The novel was first published on August 9 and September 6, 1870 in the Journal des Débats under the French title Une ville flottante . The publication in book form took place on July 17, 1871 under the title Une ville flottante together with the short story Die Blockade-Brecher ( Forceurs de blocus ) in the publishing house Pierre-Jules Hetzel in Paris . The first German-language edition appeared in 1875 under the title Eine schwimmende Stadt .
background
In this autobiographical novel, the technology enthusiast Jules Verne describes the crossing on the Great Eastern, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to the United States , which he actually started as a passenger in the spring of 1867 with his brother Paul Verne . Since nothing exciting had happened on the crossing, Verne decorated his experiences.
He used, among other things, incidents and breakdowns that should have occurred on board the ship due to the not yet fully developed technology. The Great Eastern was 211 meters long and overtaxed the builder and operator due to its unprecedented size. Verne also describes a number of less serious incidents that he only knew from stories. Nevertheless, Verne shows his enthusiasm for the ship in the novel. He sees in him a triumph of the human spirit. Verne has supplemented his portrayal, which is similar to a report , with a short, dramatic love story.
Only the descriptions of the maritime environment and those of the excursion to Niagara Falls fully correspond to the reality he experienced. Verne visited Niagara Falls with his brother in real life. They traveled the Hudson River with a steamboat towards Albany , in order to get from there by train to the Canadian side of the Niagara Falls. The cases excited him so much that he used them as the setting in his books Robur the Conqueror and The Family Without a Name , among other things .
literature
- Heinrich Pleticha (ed.): Jules Verne manual . Deutscher Bücherbund / Bertelsmann, Stuttgart and Munich 1992.
- Volker Dehs and Ralf Junkerjürgen: Jules Verne . Voices and interpretations of his work. Fantastic Library Wetzlar, Wetzlar 2005.
- Volker Dehs: Jules Verne . Jules Verne. A critical biography. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2005. ISBN 3-538-07208-6
Web links
- "A floating city" as an e-book in HTML on zeno.org
- A floating city in Andreas Fehrmann's Jules Verne Collection
Individual evidence
- ↑ page 1 below
- ↑ page 1 below
- ^ Digitized at Archive.org
- ^ Andreas Fehrmann: A floating city. Retrieved April 28, 2010 .