Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel

Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel
Author: Victor Brombert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1984
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780674935518

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.

To Love Is to Act

To Love Is to Act
Author: Marva A. Barnett
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Conscience in literature
ISBN: 9780997228762

"To love is to act"-- "Aimer, c'est agir." These words, which Victor Hugo wrote three days before he died, epitomize his life's philosophy. His love of freedom, democracy, and all people--especially the poor and wretched--drove him not only to write his epic Les Misérables but also to follow his conscience. We have much to learn from Hugo, who battled for justice, lobbied against slavery and the death penalty, and fought for the rights of women and children. In a series of essays that interweave Hugo's life with Les Misérables and point to the novel's contemporary relevance, To Love Is to Act explores how Hugo reveals his guiding principles for life, including his belief in the redemptive power of love and forgiveness. Enriching the book are insights from artists who captured the novel's heart in the famed musical, Les Mis creators Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, producer of the musical Les Misérables Cameron Mackintosh, film director Tom Hooper, and award-winning actors who have portrayed Jean Valjean: Colm Wilkinson and Hugh Jackman.

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo
Author: Graham Robb
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 726
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393318999

"Graham Robb tells the complicated story of this colossal life with authority and sympathy. . . . Unquestionably, a magnificent biography".--"Washington Square Press". of photos.

Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World

Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World
Author: John Chambers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2008-01-16
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1594777446

First English translation of Victor Hugo’s writings on his experiments in spiritualism • Reveals Hugo’s conversations with renowned discarnate entities such as Shakespeare, Plato, Galileo, and Jesus • Examines his contacts with aliens from the planets Mercury and Jupiter and the revelation that our entire universe is a quantum hologram • Discusses Hugo’s possible role as a grand master of the Priory of Sion During Victor Hugo’s exile on the Isle of Jersey, where he and his family and friends escaped the reign of Napoléon III, he conducted “table-tapping” séances, transcribing hundreds of channeled conversations with entities from the beyond. Among his discarnate visitors were Shakespeare, Plato, Hannibal, Rousseau, Galileo, Sir Walter Scott, and Jesus. According to the transcripts, Jesus, during his three visits, condemns Druidism, faults Christianity, and suggests a new religion with Hugo as its prophet. To the skeptic, some of the “conversations” may seem self-serving--at best, the subconscious wishes of the naïve participants. But author John Chambers places Hugo’s experiments firmly in the tradition of visionary literature and psychic exploration, aligning those experiences with the poetry of William Blake, the table-tapping experiences of the Fox sisters, and the channeled writings of the great modern-day Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill, whose spirits’ utterances uncannily resemble those of Hugo’s. Hugo’s transcriptions are the missing link between the early nineteenth century’s fascination with the kabbalistic Zohar, reincarnation, and the writings of the Illuminati and the rise of spiritualism and the societies for the study of psychic phenomena in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Satan and His Daughter, the Angel Liberty

Satan and His Daughter, the Angel Liberty
Author: Victor Hugo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780997228731

Victor Hugo spent years in political exile off the coast of Normandy. While there, he produced his masterpiece, Les Misérables--but that wasn't all: he also wrote a book-length poem, La Fin de Satan, left unfinished and not published until after his death. Satan and his Daughter, the Angel Liberty, drawn from this larger poem, tells the story of Satan and his daughter, the angel created by God from a feather left behind following his banishment. Hugo details Satan's fall, and through a despairing soliloquy, reveals him intent on revenge, yet desiring God's forgiveness. The angel Liberty, meanwhile, is presented by Hugo as the embodiment of good, working to convince her father to return to Heaven. This new translation by Richard Skinner presents Hugo's verse in a unique prose approach to the poet's poignant work, and is accompanied by the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon's haunting illustrations. No adventurous reader will want to miss this beautiful mingling of the epic and familial, religious and political.

The Later Novels of Victor Hugo

The Later Novels of Victor Hugo
Author: Kathryn M. Grossman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191636436

This study places the last three novels of Victor 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). By situating these historical narratives in relation to each other, to all of Hugo's previous fiction, and to a number of poetic and critical works published in exile and in the initial years of the Third Republic, it illuminates the final structural and thematic shifts from a poetics of harmony to one of transcendence. As in Les Misérables, the disharmony associated with social tumult, apocalyptic vision, and oxymoronic tensions provides an essential component of the later Hugo's Romantic sublime. Instead of merely capitalizing on the runaway success of Les Misérables by recycling its prominent features, however, each novel makes an original contribution to the political and aesthetic trajectory inscribed by the entire oeuvre. Each testifies as well to the wizardry of Hugo's own 'special effects' that contribute to his story-telling genius. Such effects, especially the dizzying spatial optics and manipulation of temporal dimensions, function not as mere playful gimmicks or novelistic flourishes but as strategies for figuring and communicating the ideal, both political and artistic. The unique interplay of poetic and historical discourse in each text reconfigures our disordered experience of the world into something far more coherent: a construction of meaning that strives to change perceptions and to promote social action.

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.

The Novel of the Century

The Novel of the Century
Author: David Bellos
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-03-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0374716293

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award, 2017 Les Misérables is among the most popular and enduring novels ever written. Like Inspector Javert’s dogged pursuit of Jean Valjean, its appeal has never waned, but only grown broader in its one-hundred-and-fifty-year life. Whether we encounter Victor Hugo’s story on the page, onstage, or on-screen, Les Misérables continues to captivate while also, perhaps unexpectedly, speaking to contemporary concerns. In The Novel of the Century, the acclaimed scholar and translator David Bellos tells us why. This enchanting biography of a classic of world literature is written for “Les Mis” fanatics and novices alike. Casting decades of scholarship into accessible narrative form, Bellos brings to life the extraordinary story of how Victor Hugo managed to write his novel of the downtrodden despite a revolution, a coup d’état, and political exile; how he pulled off a pathbreaking deal to get it published; and how his approach to the “social question” would define his era’s moral imagination. More than an ode to Hugo’s masterpiece, The Novel of the Century also shows that what Les Misérables has to say about poverty, history, and revolution is full of meaning today.