The Hollow Earth is a concept proposing that the planet Earth is entirely hollow or contains a substantial interior space. Notably suggested by Edmond Halley in the late 17th century, the notion was disproven, first tentatively by Pierre Bouguer in 1740, then definitively by Charles Hutton in his Schiehallion experiment around 1774.
Sir Henry Rider Haggard was an English writer of adventure fiction romances set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a pioneer of the lost world literary genre. He was also involved in land reform throughout the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential.
King Solomon's Mines (1885) is a popular novel by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of an expedition through an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain, searching for the missing brother of one of the party. It is one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa and is considered to be the genesis of the lost world literary genre. Haggard dedicated this book to his childhood idol Humphry Davy.
Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1888.
Sir Orfeo is an anonymous Middle English Breton lai dating from the late 13th or early 14th century. It retells the story of Orpheus as a king who rescues his wife from the fairy king. The folk song Orfeo is based on this poem.
She, subtitled A History of Adventure, is a novel by the English writer H. Rider Haggard, published in book form in 1887 following serialisation in The Graphic magazine between October 1886 and January 1887. She was extraordinarily popular upon its release and has never been out of print.
Journey to the Center of the Earth, also translated with the variant titles A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and A Journey into the Interior of the Earth, is a classic science fiction novel by Jules Verne. It was first published in French in 1864, then reissued in 1867 in a revised and expanded edition. Professor Otto Lidenbrock is the tale's central figure, an eccentric German scientist who believes there are volcanic tubes that reach to the very center of the earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their Icelandic guide Hans rappel into Iceland's celebrated inactive volcano Snæfellsjökull, then contend with many dangers, including cave-ins, subpolar tornadoes, an underground ocean, and living prehistoric creatures from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. Eventually the three explorers are spewed back to the surface by an active volcano, Stromboli, located in southern Italy.
Allan Quatermain is the protagonist of H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines, its one sequel Allan Quatermain (1887), twelve prequel novels and four prequel short stories, totalling eighteen works. An English professional big game hunter and adventurer, in film and television he has been portrayed by Richard Chamberlain, Sean Connery, Cedric Hardwicke, Patrick Swayze and Stewart Granger among others.
James De Mille was a professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and an early Canadian novelist who published numerous works of popular fiction from the late 1860s through the 1870s.
Joseph Thomson was a British geologist and explorer who played an important part in the Scramble for Africa. Thomson's gazelle and Thomson's Falls, Nyahururu, are named after him. Excelling as an explorer rather than an exact scientist, he avoided confrontations among his porters or with indigenous peoples, neither killing any native nor losing any of his men to violence. His motto is often quoted to be "He who goes gently, goes safely; he who goes safely, goes far."
The Lost Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, also known as the Sonnini Manuscript, is a short text purporting to be the translation of a manuscript containing the 29th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, detailing Paul the Apostle's journey to Britannia, where he preached to a tribe of Israelites on "Mount Lud", later the site of St Paul's Cathedral, and met with Druids, who proved to him that they were descended from Jews. Thereafter, Paul preached in Gaul and Belgium, and then to Switzerland (Helvetia), where a miraculous earthquake occurred at the site of Pontius Pilate's supposed suicide.
The lost world is a subgenre of the fantasy or science fiction genres that involves the discovery of an unknown Earth civilization. It began as a subgenre of the late-Victorian adventure romance and remains popular into the 21st century.
Wildside Press is an independent publishing company in Cabin John, Maryland, United States. It was founded in 1989 by John Betancourt and Kim Betancourt. While the press was originally conceived as a publisher of speculative fiction in both trade and limited editions, its focus has broadened since then, both in content and format.
A treasure map is a map that marks the location of buried treasure, a lost mine, a valuable secret or a hidden locale. More common in fiction than in reality, "pirate treasure maps" are often depicted in works of fiction as hand drawn and containing arcane clues for the characters to follow. Regardless of the term's literary use, anything that meets the broad definition of a "map" that describes the location of a "treasure" could appropriately be called a "treasure map."
Elements of the supernatural and the fantastic were an element of literature from its beginning, though the idea of a distinct genre, in the modern sense, is less than two centuries old.
One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances is a collection of fantasy short stories by Théophile Gautier, selected from his Nouvelles and Romans et Contes and translated from the French by Lafcadio Hearn. The translation was Hearn's first book, and is considered one of the best English translations of Gautier. It was first published in hardcover by Richard Worthington in 1882, and reprinted in 1886, 1888, 1890 and 1891; later reprint editions were issued by H. W. Hagemann (1894) and Brentano's in 1899, 1900, 1906, 1910, 1915, and 1927. The first British edition was published by MacLaren and Co. in 1907. The work was reprinted in 1999 by Wildside Press, a trade paperback edition with page count matching the original.
The type of romance considered here is mainly the genre of novel defined by the novelist Walter Scott as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", in contrast to mainstream novels which realistically depict the state of a society. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Scott's novels are also frequently described as historical romances, and Northrop Frye suggested "the general principle that most 'historical novels' are romances". Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".
A scholarly edition of the work was published by the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (CEECT) (see below). This edition is the source of the information provided by this article.
