Cosmic Travel Writing Research In Early French Science Fiction Literature

Because of Jules Verne,the so-called father of science fiction,French science fiction attract extensive attention from researchers and readers worldwide.Some works were translated into China since the late Qing dynasty,helping Chinese build the earliest cognitive model of science fiction and promoting the birth of Chinese science fiction at least to some extent.However,when facing French proto-science fiction before Verne,which play an important role in the history of science fiction,there are little things that we have ever known.The cosmic travel writings of French proto-science fiction are the main objects of study.The study is also combined with text analysis of the major writers and their works of each period,including the relative travel writings as predecessors of cosmic travel writings.The history of French proto-science fiction is constructed based on these.The thesis starts from a review on the relationship among fiction,imagination and traveling from the oldest vernacular literature in Western Europe to the fantastic literature in the age of the great geographical discoveries,and then moves to the redefinition of conceptions and translations of four literary terms: fantastique,fantasy,merveilleux and science fiction.Finally,the thesis focuses on the development of cosmic travel writings in French proto-science fiction history,comparing and contrasting the similarities and differences between modern space opera and them.To sum up,the cosmic travel writings merely reflects of the changing relationship between the nature and human beings;but the study leads to a conclusion that the French proto-science fiction already had the core features of modern Sci-Fi,which on the one hand,the thought experiment,which means the author may create a fiction world through the new scientific writing method as reasonably as he can,on the other hand,the emphasis of the importance of humanistic concerns,which make the author effectively approach to the artistic reality by imagination.