The title of this study “History in the text” is an oxymoronic phrase, and by this, the main focus of the book is clear immediately. On the other hand, there still remains the question to what extent text and history are comparable. The author of this volume tries to answer this by discussing the famous novel of Victor Hugo Quatrevingt-Treize against the background of the French Revolution.

The title of this study “History in the text” is an oxymoronic phrase, and by this, the main focus of the book is clear immediately. On the other hand, there still remains the question to what extent text and history are comparable. The author of this volume tries to answer this by discussing the famous novel of Victor Hugo Quatrevingt-Treize against the background of the French Revolution.

An up-to-date, comprehensive and interdisciplinary interpretationof notions of evil in French literature and thought.

The bloody events of the Paris Commune in 1871 traumatized France. In this study of cultural memory, the author draws on a range of sources to understand the resonating questions about the terrible year.

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.

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.