The Squid and the Lentil: A-Hundred-and-Fifty Years under the Sea

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869-70), this article traces three vectors of Verne's, and the novel's, influence, in relation to three genres or modes of writing: science fiction, as it began to emerge as a sharply delineated category in the early twentieth century; French literary theory and philosophy, in which Verne's work appeared as a favorite touchstone of influential writers including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey; and weird fiction, for which Twenty Thousand Leagues, with its monstrous squid, has been retroactively constructed as a (minor) foundational text.