The Squid and the Lentil: A-Hundred-and-Fifty Years under the Sea

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869–70), this article traces three vectors of Verne’s, and the novel’s, influence, in relation to three genres or modes of writing: science fiction, as it began to emerge as a sharply delineated category in the early twentieth century; French literary theory and philosophy, in which Verne’s work appeared as a favorite touch-stone of influential writers including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey; and weird fiction, for which Twenty Thousand Leagues, with its monstrous squid, has been retroactively constructed as a (minor) foundational text.