Dialogues of the imagination. Concepts used to evoke the monstrous and the marvellous in the geography of the Journey to the centre of the Earth (Jules Verne, 1867)
Of the 62 accounts included in the Extraordinary journeys of Jules Verne (1828-1905), Journey to the centre of the Earth (1867) is the one where the author uses the largest number of images or illustrations of things monstrous. Furthermore, each one of them exemplifies a specific form of something marvellous, an approach which makes it possible for the Vernian narrative to generate its own particular geographical imagination. In this literally extraordinary world, the slow descent undertaken by the heroes represents a particularly effective fictional illustration of one of the fundamental concepts examined by Gilbert Durand in his study entitled The anthropological structures of the imaginary (1990).