Journal of Transnational American Studies

In From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Jules Verne imagined a fictional Floridian site, a high desert plateau on which to build the gigantic space gun that would send astronauts to the moon. In North Against South (1886), the liquid, labyrinthine eco-system of the Everglades served as a backdrop to the Civil War. Both texts produced contradictory and complementary figurations of the Sunshine State, ancient and modern, arid and watery, traversed by history as well as myth.