Jaques Vernevil Jaques Vernevil i(A105754 works by) (Organisation) assertion
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
6 6 y separately published work icon La Terre Australe Connue: C'est a Dire, la Description de ce Pays Inconnu Jusqu'ici, de ses Moeurs & de ses Coutumes (International) assertion Gabriel De Foigny , Geneva : Jaques Vernevil , 1676 Z1387533 1676 single work novel adventure Foigny's La Terre Australe Connue, published in 1676, is a fantastically engaging and playful example of the 'imaginary voyage' genre. It is also a seventeenth-century work with some curiously modern resonances. Written in the tradition of More's Utopia, and serving itself as a forerunner to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, The Southern Land, Known offered its readers a radical criticism of then prevailing ideologies in the guise of a lively and provocative novel. Knowledge of the vast continent of Australia was, in Foigny's day, still mingled with legends, hearsay, and travelers' tales. It is in this context that the 'unknown Southern Land' becomes known to the hero of this short, action-packed, and highly structured story. The narrator braves a long sea journey, raging storms, shipwrecks, giant whales, and high-flying creatures that try to eat him - all to reach the mysterious Austral utopia. Peopled by hermaphrodites, Foigny's Australia is a society in which distinctions of both class and gender have been abolished. It includes, among other things, an indictment of 'the great empire that the male usurped over the female' as 'rather a form of tyranny than a just cause' (Libraries Australia).
X