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Géographie des peuples fabuleux
Olivier Philipponnat

Our literature is filled with races and tribes whose existence was suspected as far back as Antiquity (like the Blemmyæ, a race of headless humans described by Pliny the Elder), fantasized about during the Middle Ages (the Amazons, those invincible women warriors that appealed to a Europe ravaged by bloody clashes and conflicts), scientifically attested to and redefined from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (from the time of the earliest encounters with native Americans to the invention of Pygmies by racialist science), then missed and reinvented in the 20th (Roswell’s extraterrestrial, the incarnation of an encounter of the third kind).

Olivier Philipponnat proposes an exploration of that imaginary topic in the form of an erudite and entertaining literary journey through the meanders of the successive fantasies and prejudices of those who discovered them… or said they had.

No one before him has ever attempted to inventory and map all of the populations and races, from Antiquity to the present day, that have since been proven either never to have existed or to have been presented in an erroneous, misleading or fantastical way, but to whom numerous — albeit more or less serious, sincere, fraudulent, authentic or utopian — texts, treatises and eyewitness accounts have nonetheless been devoted over the centuries.

Géographie des peuples fabuleux -
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  • Publication date : 08/09/2022
  • Size : 14 x 20,5 cm, 320 p., 24,90 EUR €
  • ISBN 978-2-283-03509-2
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