Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel

by Victor Brombert

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674935518
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1986
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature and Director of the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

1. Approaches

2. The Condemned Man

3. The Living Stones of Notre-Dame

Editorial Reviews

By all odds the most thorough and critically sophisticated book on Hugo’s fiction to appear in English, or perhaps in any language… It is learned, literate, and witty, generous in its appreciations, and an authentic pleasure to read.

Washington Post Book World

Nothing short of brilliant. Solidly researched, very well written, and full of original insights, it stands as a landmark in Hugo criticism.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Between Hugo’s hell and redemption lies a broad canvas of symbolic circumstance where Brombert maneuvers brilliantly, examining such disparate themes as money, language, laughter, and showing how they are braided together in the larger design.

New York Review of Books

Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel transcends its title, in that all of Hugo’s writings—poetic, political, dramatic, critical, public and private—are brought to bear on the novels, so that the book gives a vast picture of Hugo’s imagination and his thought on all vital matters… There is far more to be learned about Hugo’s mind from this book than from any of the biographies I have read, and it is, furthermore, exceptionally enjoyable reading.

French Review