The later novels of Victor Hugo : variations on the politics and poetics of transcendence / Kathryn M. Grossman.

The later novels of Victor Hugo : variations on the politics and poetics of transcendence / Kathryn M. Grossman.

First edition.

9780199642953
0199642958

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2012.

English

xii, 285 pages ; 23 cm

PQ2301 .G763 2012

440
848.7

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.

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.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [265]-275) and index.

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