Literary Significance and Criticism
The appearance of Verne's lost novel caused a stir among modern critics, who mostly received the book warmly, greeting it as "prescient and plausible". On the other hand, some saw the book every bit as unnecessarily pessimistic about the future as did Verne's editor.
The book was a best seller in France, where it was heavily promoted before publication. Some critics were put off by the publisher's hype of the book, although most readily admitted it was "a work of inestimable historical importance."
Critic Evelyn C. Leeper suggested that Verne might be a good candidate for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1996, noting that she had not read very many novels that were much better than Verne's work that year. The Hugo award is given annually to honor the best science fiction of the preceding year.
The work is also of importance to scholars of Verne's literary achievements, some of whom had long asserted that none of his works ever came close to prophesying the future of a whole civilization.
Within two years of the novel's appearance, it had been adapted as a stage play in the Netherlands.
Read more about this topic: Paris In The Twentieth Century
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)