The legendary island of Atlantis has often been depicted in literature, television shows, films and works of popular culture.

Fiction

Start of genre fiction

Before 1900 there was an overlap between verse epics dealing with the fall of Atlantis and novels with a pretension to fine writing which are now regarded as pioneering genre fiction. Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869/71) includes a visit to sunken Atlantis aboard Captain Nemo's submarine Nautilus – with protagonists walking for miles over the sea bottom until reaching the impressive sunken ruins, an obvious impossibility (Verne was not aware of water pressure in the ocean deeps). In Elizabeth Birkmaier's Poseidon's Paradise: the Romance of Atlantis (San Francisco 1892), the island sinks following an earthquake. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne also depicted the end of Atlantis in his fantasy The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis, first published in 1899. The main character there, the soldier-priest Deucalion, is unable to prevent the tragic decline of his continent under the rule of the evil queen Phorenice. And according to D. Bridgman-Metchim, the author of Atlantis, the Book of the Angels (London 1900), his account is an interpretation of the Book of Genesis which covers all the events which immediately preceded the Flood, as recorded by one of the fallen angels.

After 1900

(Alphabetical by author, then by title)

Comics

Manga and anime

Motion pictures

Films

Television

Music

Artists

Albums

(Alphabetical by album title)

Songs

(Alphabetical by song title, then by artist)

Opera

The opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis) was written in 1943 by Viktor Ullmann with a libretto by Peter Kien, inmates at the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt. The Nazis did not allow it to be performed, assuming the opera's reference to an Emperor of Atlantis to be in fact a satire on Hitler. Both the composer and the librettist were murdered in Auschwitz, but the manuscript survived and was performed for the first time in 1975 at Amsterdam.