About this audiobook
Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) emerged from the ferment of late nineteenth-century popular science writing and serial fiction in France. Verne, already celebrated for the educationally inflected adventure narratives later grouped as the Voyages extraordinaires, wrote the novel for Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s publishing enterprise, and it first appeared in serial form in 1872 in the Parisian press before being issued as a book in 1873. Set in the same year as its initial publication and anchored in the recognizable geography and institutions of Victorian London, the narrative reflects the period’s accelerating global connectivity—steamship lines, expanding rail networks, and telegraphic time discipline—while also registering the era’s confidence in technological progress and the habits of a metropolitan reading public eager for cosmopolitan spectacle rendered with documentary precision.
The novel dramatizes the conversion of the world into a measurable itinerary through the figure of Phileas Fogg, whose extreme regularity and abstraction of life into schedules becomes both the engine of the plot and a satiric lens on modern rationality. Verne’s brisk episodic structure turns transit itself into a principal aesthetic device, juxtaposing comic misunderstanding and improvisation—embodied by Passepartout—against the ideal of mechanical punctuality, while the wager plot tests the limits of mastery over chance, weather, and political contingency. At the same time, the book’s panoramic travelogue participates in the imperial optics of its age, treating distant locales as stages for European movement and judgment even as it popularized a new sense of planetary scale for mass audiences. Its enduring influence is evident in the proliferation of “around-the-world” narratives, adaptations across stage and screen, and its lasting association with debates about time, globalization, and the romance of speed in modernity.
