Victor Hugo And The Visionary Novel

Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the power and originality of Hugo's work, and provides a new interpretation of Hugo's narrative art as well as a synthesis of his poetic and moral vision. The twenty-eight drawings by Hugo reproduced in this book are further testimony to the visionary nature of Hugo's imagination.

This study places the last three novels of Hugo's maturity - Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), L'Homme qui rit (1869), and Quatrevingt-Treize (1874) - within the context of his artistic development after the success of Les Misérables (1862), thereby illuminating the shift from a poetics of harmony to one of transcendence.

While Victor Hugo's lasting appeal as a novelist can in large part be attributed to the unforgettable characters that he created, character has been paradoxically the most criticized and least understood element of his fiction. Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo provides readers with a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances that characterize both Hugo's novel writing and the nineteenth-century French novel, and will thus appeal to the specialist and non-specialist alike.

"This study of Victor Hugo's work aims to uncover the diversity, the thematic and narrative singularity, and the shifting ironies and resistance to interpretative closure of his writing. Novels examined include: ""Notre-Dame de Paris"", ""Les Miserables"", ""Les Travailleurs de la Mer"", ""Quatre vingt-treize"", and ""L'Homme qui Rit"". The 11 essays in the volume bring together various critical approaches from French, British and American scholars, in an attempt to provide a new point of departure and to provoke discussion of Victor Hugo's novels. This publication marks the bicentenary of Hugo's birth in 1802."

Victor Hugo is often regarded as one of the greatest French writers of all time. Best known today, for his classic novels "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" and "Les Misérables," Hugo had several novels and stories regarded equally high, and they are collected here (along with all of his other classics). This collection includes: The History of a Crime The Hunchback of Notre Dame Les Miserables The Man Who Laughs The Memoirs of Victor Hugo Napoleon the Little

In this study of Hugo's achievement, Laurence M. Porter offers a corrective to these misconceptions, taking a fresh look at a man who has long been a veritable institution in French culture. Without neglecting Hugo's political career, Porter emphasizes the richness and subtlety of his creative work.

Though he wrote more than a century ago, French author Victor Hugo (1802-1885) continues to capture the imagination of contemporary readers both in France and around the world. In the United States, he is best remembered as the author of the novel Les Mis^D'erables (1862), which has been adapted for the stage, and of Notre-Dame-de-Paris (1831), more commonly known to Americans as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But Hugo was also a poet and dramatist, a great religious and social thinker, and one of the most important shapers of French Romanticism. As a poet, he created new verse forms, explored historical and mythological themes, and criticized social issues of his time. Through his drama, he united prose and poetry and examined the politics of England and Spain. In all of his works, he discussed such theological and social issues as the problem of evil, the nature of war and peace, and the problems of capital punishment. The volume begins with a short biography that places Hugo within the context of 19th-century France. The biography tells of his early years during which he began to form his religious and political views, his maturation as a writer and thinker during the 1830s, and his political exile, during which he wrote some of his finest poetry. The alphabetically arranged entries that follow discuss his works, characters, themes, and ideas, as well as historical persons and places that figured prominently in his life and writings. Many of the entries cite sources of additional information, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.