Buy online:
UK, Europe or Asia
  (in pounds sterling)
USA and the Americas
  (in US dollars)

Victor Hugo
(1802-85)
French writer
 3 other titles

Legenda: Oxford, 2002
£35.00 ($65.00 US)  Paperback  236pp
ISBN: 1-900755-58-0

For a long time, Victor Hugo’s novels attracted little critical attention in spite of their obvious power and uniqueness. In recent years, however, scholars have returned to Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Misérables, Les Travailleurs de la mer, Quatrevingt-treize and L’Homme qui rit, uncovering the diversity, the thematic and narrative singularity, the shifting ironies and resistance to interpretative closure of works once judged simplistic and based upon `une sagesse abrégée’. The eleven essays in this volume bring together various critical approaches from eminent French, British and American scholars, to provide a new point of departure and to provoke discussion. The contributors range from the most distinguished specialists with world-wide reputations to young scholars at the beginning of their career who none the less have challenging and original things to say about a fascinating and unjustly neglected subject.

J. A. Hiddleston is Professor of French at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Exeter College.

With the contributions:

Laurence Porter — Politics, Family and the Authorial Preconscious in Hugo’s Han d’Islande and Bug-Jargal
Frank Bowman — L’Intertextualité du Dernier Jour d’un condamné
Rachel Killick — Notre-Dame de Paris as Cinema: From Myth to Commodity
Jacques Seebacher — Circonscription de l’abîme
Fiona Cox — ‘The Dawn of a Hope so Horrible’: Javert and the Absurd
Delphine Gleizes — Genèse des formes. Textes et dessins autour des Travailleurs de la mer
Kathryn M. Grossman — ‘Pleine mer, Plein ciel’: The Wave of the Future in Les Travailleurs de la mer
Elise Noetinger — L’Art du costume: L’Homme qui rit ou le drame de l’apparence
Yves Gohin — Alternance et adhérence des contraires dans Quatrevingt-Treize
Christopher Thompson — Victor Hugo rôdeur de barrières et de frontières
J. A. Hiddleston — Suicide in the Novels of Victor Hugo