La robinsonnade d’anticipation: Sur une forme composite et ses péripéties

In nineteenth-century French literature, adventure novels and futuristic fictions share various narrative and thematic features which generate an extensive set of “science fiction adventure” novels that have not attracted much critical attention to date. However, such hybrid narratives lead us to reconsider a certain kind of futuristic fiction as it is defined as much by a geographical shift as by time travel. The particular and prolific case of the robinsonnade, regarded as a pivotal subgenre of adventure, facilitates highlighting such generic interferences. This paper examines four novels related either to utopian travel literature or to Jules Verne’s literary and editorial paradigm of the “voyages extraordinaires” in order to shed light on the dynamics framing the earliest forms of science fiction built on the topic of remote, flying, or spatial island. (In French)