Imaginary Conquest and Epistemology in Nineteenth-Century Adventure Literature: Africa in Jules Verne, Burmann, May, and Twain

Abstract

The article examines fictitious adventure literature set in Africa from the last decades of the 19th century. In Cinq semaines en ballon (1863), Jules Verne surveysthe continent and thereby renders it accessible to European penetration. Carl Burmann (1880) and Karl May (1889) contribute to defining a specifically German mission in Africa. In Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), Mark Twain uses the continent, and the West’s obsessive preoccupation with its mysteries, as a means to stage the negotiation of an epistemological agenda.