ABSTRACT
In The Fur Country, Jules Verne tells the story of Lt. Jasper Hobson, who was commissioned by the Hudson Bay Fur Company to find a new, profitable outpost for the fur trade on the north coast of America. Jules Verne's polar novel The Fur Country is, therefore, a sort of shipwreck narrative, a shipwreck tale without the wreck, so to speak, since the endangered floating device is not a ship, nor a boat, but an iceberg, a drifting platform made of dissolving ice. This chapter shows what extent Prvost's pseudotranslation can be described as a cultural translation of geographical imaginations and in what sense its fictional narrative of sea travel stages itself as nautical writing. As Paolo Rambelli states, a pseudotranslation is a powerful device for cultural transitions. While it recurs in almost any epoch, pseudotranslation gains in saliency and proliferates 'in periods of profound political and social transformation'.
