The Later Novels of Victor Hugo

The Later Novels of Victor Hugo
Author: Kathryn M. Grossman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199642958

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.

Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo

Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo
Author: Isabel Roche
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1557534381

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.

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo
Author: Bradley Stephens
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2019-02-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1789141117

Victor Hugo is an icon of French culture. He achieved immense success as a poet, dramatist, and novelist, and he was also elected to both houses of the French Parliament. Leading the Romantic campaign against artistic tradition and defying the Second Empire in exile, he became synonymous with the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. His state funeral in Paris made headlines across the world, and his breadth of appeal remains evident today, not least thanks to the popularity of his bestseller, Les Misérables, and its myriad theatrical and cinematic incarnations. This biography, the first in English for more than twenty years, provides a concise but comprehensive exploration of Hugo’s monumental body of work within the context of his dramatic life. Hugo wrestled with family tragedy and personal misgivings while being pulled into the turmoil of the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon’s Empire to the rise of France’s Third Republic. Throughout these twists of fate, he sensed a natural order of collapse and renewal. This unending cycle of creation shaped his ideas about freedom and roused his imagination, which he channeled into his prolific writing and other outlets like drawing. As Bradley Stephens argues, such creative intellectual vigor suggests that Hugo was too restless to sit comfortably on the pedestal of literary greatness; Hugo’s was a mind as revolutionary as the time in which he lived.

Figuring Transcendence in Les Miserables

Figuring Transcendence in Les Miserables
Author: Kathryn M. Grossman
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 1994
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780809318896

The intricate interweaving of characters, plot, subplots, themes, imagery, topography, and digressions in Hugo's prose masterpiece results in a completely integrated metaphorical system. Superficial chaos, Grossman argues, is deeply ordered by repeating patterns that produce a kind of literary fractal, a multilayered verbal network.

Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

Les Misérables and Its Afterlives
Author: Kathryn M. Grossman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317105702

Exploring the enduring popularity of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, this collection offers analysis of both the novel itself and its adaptations. In spite of a mixed response from critics, Les Misérables instantly became a global bestseller. Since its successful publication over 150 years ago, it has traveled across different countries, cultures, and media, giving rise to more than 60 international film and television variations, numerous radio dramatizations, animated versions, comics, and stage plays. Most famously, it has inspired the world's longest running musical, which itself has generated a wealth of fan-made and online content. Whatever its form, Hugo’s tale of social injustice and personal redemption continues to permeate the popular imagination. This volume draws together essays from across a variety of fields, combining readings of Les Misérables with reflections on some of its multimedia afterlives, including musical theater and film from the silent period to today's digital platforms. The contributors offer new insights into the development and reception of Hugo's celebrated classic, deepening our understanding of the novel as a work that unites social commentary with artistic vision and raising important questions about the cultural practice of adaptation.

The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution

The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution
Author: Michael J. Braddick
Publisher:
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 019969589X

This Handbook brings together leading historians of the events surrounding the English revolution, exploring how the events of the revolution grew out of, and resonated, in the politics and interactions of the each of the Three Kingdoms--England, Scotland, and Ireland. It captures a shared British and Irish history, comparing the significance of events and outcomes across the Three Kingdoms. In doing so, the Handbook offers a broader context for the history of the Scottish Covenanters, the Irish Rising of 1641, and the government of Confederate Ireland, as well as the British and Irish perspective on the English civil wars, the English revolution, the Regicide, and Cromwellian period. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution explores the significance of these events on a much broader front than conventional studies. The events are approached not simply as political, economic, and social crises, but as challenges to the predominant forms of religious and political thought, social relations, and standard forms of cultural expression. The contributors provide up-to-date analysis of the political happenings, considering the structures of social and political life that shaped and were re-shaped by the crisis. The Handbook goes on to explore the long-term legacies of the crisis in the Three Kingdoms and their impact in a wider European context.

Victor Hugo, Romancier de l'Abime

Victor Hugo, Romancier de l'Abime
Author: James Hiddleston
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351197975

"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, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty

Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty
Author: Bradley Stephens
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351193015

"The arch-Romantic Victor Hugo (1802-85) and the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) are widely perceived to have little in common beyond their canonical status. However, responding to Sartre's often overlooked fascination with Hugo, Bradley Stephens cuts through generic divisions to argue that significant parallels between the two writers have been neglected. Stephens argues that both Hugo and Sartre engage with human beings in distinctly non-ontological terms, thereby anticipating postmodernist approaches to human experience. From different origins but towards similar realisations, they expose the indeterminate human condition as at once release and restriction. These writers insist that liberty is not simply a political ideal, but an existential condition which engages human endeavour as a dynamic rather than definitive mode of being. This incisive new book affirms the ongoing relevance of the two most iconic French writers of the modern period to contemporary discourse on what it means to be free."