Talk:Louis Geoffroy

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Alternate History (inactive)

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Potential sources

I do not this week have time to incorporate any material into an article, but here is some information that may influence the decision to delete:

• "the first book-length alternate history, another French breakthrough in exploration of science fiction's temporal dimension: Louis Geoffroy's Napoléon et la conquête du monde—1812 à 1832—histoire de la monarchie universelle[...] partly a devastating critique of the real Napoleon's blunders in Russia and of the Napoleonic system as a terrifyingly efficient police state[...] a foreshadowing of Orwell's Big Brother[...]. Partly, too, however, Geoffroy's book is a Bonapartist's nostalgic utopia, portraying a technologically advanced Francophone world that might have been". --Alkon, Paul K.. Science Fiction Before 1900 : Imagination Discovers Technology, Taylor & Francis Group, 2002.
  • This book spends about two pages (pp.64-65) on Geoffroy's book and speculates that it might have inspired Jules Verne.
• "in the genre I'm calling 'alternate history'[...] Geoffroy-Château's Napoléon et la conquête du monde is not only the first but also one of the purest examples of the form[...]. Geoffroy-Château was explicit about his purpose; he explained that he was giving Napoleon the history he should have had, one worthy of the lofty and visionary character. His history is the just history, the history proper to an unswerving Napoleon.[...] it is nothing like a nineteenth-century novel, and Geoffroy-Château's Napoleon is far closer to a hero of the Old Romance than to any contemporary fictional models." --Gallagher, Catherine. "What would Napoleon do? Historical, Fictional, and Counterfactual Characters." New Literary History 42.2 (2011///Spring): 315,336,361.
  • about 6 paragraphs of discussion on Geoffroy's book specifically.
• "Napoléon apocryphe represented the first true work of political fiction, one that adopted a utopian view of history—history not as it was, but as it might have been." --Murat, Laure. The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness, University of Chicago Press, 2014.
  • about half of page 128, but "first true work of political fiction" may be a significant claim.
• "He was not the first to write an alternate history, but by inflecting alt-history via the last man logic of the Romantic period, and by working systematically at his premise, Geoffroy produced the template that this important sub-genre went on to follow.[...] Geoffroy thinks of Napoleon as Napoleon thought of himself, a man elevated above the common herd, looking down upon the ideological and political mists of the world." --Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016.
  • pp.143-147, about four full pages devoted to analysing Geoffroy's novel. Roberts compares it with Tolstoy, and says that sci-fi literature in general follows Geoffroy's mode of the singular individual as the axis about which the world turns.
• there is an entry dedicated to the novel in the Historical Dictionary of Utopianism, in which the author(s) of that entry criticises "Geoffroy-Château's naive belief in the sustainability of a monomanical blueprint utopia". --Widdicombe, Toby; Morris, James M. & Kross, Andrea. Historical Dictionary of Utopianism, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2017.
• about 20% of chapter 2 of Catherine Gallagher's book Telling It Like It Wasn't is devoted to Geoffroy's novel. Haven't read through the whole thing, don't know what is duplicative of Gallagher's article quoted above.

--superioridad ^(discusión) 05:29, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Removing proposed deletion

After thinking over the above sources (and others I've found), I am removing the proposed deletion notice because I think that at least of the author or the alternate history novel he wrote is notable. (I think moving this page to a page for the novel could be justifiable, however.)

Several independent reliable sources that I have listed above (papers in academic journals and books by academic publishers) describe Napoleon and the Conquest of the World as a pioneering work in the science-fiction subgenre of alternate history and have some substantial mention and discussion of it. This makes the novel historically significant and therefore notable.

I intend to do some work myself to improve the article's sourcing over the next two or three weeks, but it may take some time for me to get around to it. Obviously anybody who wants to do that work before I get to it should feel free; I have found some additional sources that could also be used for the article, so if any editors reading this would like the links to those, ping me. --superioridad ^(discusión) 02:36, 2 July 2024 (UTC)