Victor Hugo and the Rhetorical Possibilities of “Monstrous Hybridity” in Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary Fiction

2015 ◽  
pp. 152-196
Author(s):  
Marlene L. Daut
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victor Hugo

Marine Bizarrerie: The Imaginative Biology of the Underwater Frontier

2018 ◽  
pp. 169-185
Author(s):  
Margaret Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Aquatic Life ◽  
Psychological Experience ◽  
Narrative Prose ◽  
Jules Michelet

The great variety and radical metamorphoses of aquatic life forms attracted huge fascination during the nineteenth century, in part because they defied familiar paradigms of development and progress. In this chapter, Cohen explores how writers were inspired by such marine life-cycles to try out experiments in narrative prose, focusing in particular on the influence of marine variety on the depiction of psychological experience. Starting with Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus (1855), Cohen argues that Kingsley uses the life forms of the underwater kingdom to re-energise the poetic figure of metamorphosis, which, in his treatment, depends more upon natural science than myth. Cohen then shows how Kingsley translates marine metamorphosis into narrative experiment in The Water-Babies (1862), and creates an account of psychological experience that is more hallucinatory and phantasmagorical than developmental. Cohen finally suggests that marine metamorphosis has a similar impact on other authors, including Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet, all of whom stress the disturbing and disruptive possibilities of a psychological prose inspired by aquatic biology.

‘Grass grows, a passer-by is an event and everybody knows everybody else’

The Marais ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-78
Author(s):  
Keith Reader
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Theophile Gautier ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Alphonse Daudet

This recounts the story of our quartier between 1789 and the turn of the nineteenth century. Canonical literary and cultural figures such as Balzac – the supreme chronicler of nineteenth-century Paris – Victor Hugo and the film-maker Marcel Carné, whose Les Enfants du paradis is set at the limit of the area, are discussed side by side with less prominent but nonetheless important names such as the influential Romantic Théophile Gautier, Alphonse Daudet and Eugène Sue whose Les Mystères de Paris is a much-undervalued precursor of Naturalism. This period saw the appearance of the first guide-books, references to the Marais in which are cited and analysed, and towards the end the arrival of increasing numbers of Jewish residents, whose presence then and thereafter has been a major factor in the quartier’s identity.

Comment on “Forecasts of Warfare in Fiction”

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-26
Author(s):  
Martin Schwarz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Single Well ◽  
French Author

In his “Forecasts of Warfare in Fiction: 1803–1914”, I. F. Clarke considers for the greatest part English books and articles, with only a few references to the French fictional output on future wars in the nineteenth century. The most prominent place is given to Captain Danrit and his trilogy. Not a single well known French author is mentioned in the article, with the exception of Victor Hugo, who does not fit into the category of writings which interest Professor Clarke.

scholarly journals ‘Victor Hugo, the Irish ‘Misérables, and Fenian women in the nineteenth-century’

2015 ◽  
pp. 131-135
Author(s):  
Jeanna Ní Riordáin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Spiritual Beliefs ◽  
Paul Verlaine ◽  
National Icon

When W.B. Yeats first met Maud Gonne, he told her of his ambition to be an ‘Irish Victor Hugo.’ Indeed the influence of France’s greatest national poet on Yeats appears to have been profound and lasting. In his youth Yeats claims to have read Hugo’s entire works, he quotes frequently form Hugo, and he spoke of Hugo at his meeting with the French poet Paul Verlaine in Paris. While the leader of French Romanticisim no doubt very pleasingly appealed to Yeats’ literary sensibilities, his political humanism, and his somewhat outlandish spiritual beliefs, the links between France’s greatest national icon and Ireland are in fact far greater than has ever been acknowledged. This article seeks to explore Hugo’s little-acknowledged, though decisive role as a spokesperson for the Irish ‘Misérables’ during the nineteenth-century. As well as examining Hugo’s much-overlooked support for the plight of the irish, this article will move on to ...

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

2021 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
SJ Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Martin Delany ◽  
Military Uniform ◽  
The Military

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

Les Misérables

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn M. Grossman ◽  
Bradley Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Collaborative Development ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Les Miserables ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Scholarly Attention

One of Britain’s most profitable musical exports, Les Misérables has captivated audiences worldwide with its mix of stirring spectacle and high emotion. Critical response has, however, been deeply divided. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s ‘megamusical’ has often been accused of trivializing the mammoth nineteenth-century novel by Victor Hugo on which it is based, reducing Hugo’s epic of social injustice to populist sentimentalism. To challenge the cliché of the inferiority of adaptations and the bias towards ‘high art’ that such criticism generates, this essay specifies the relationship between Hugo’s global bestseller and the world’s longest-running musical. This connection has received much less scholarly attention than the fame of each work would suggest. By exploring their affiliation within the contexts of both Hugo’s Romanticism and the libretto’s collaborative development from Paris to London, a revealing likeness is identified that clearly underpins the success of the ‘show of shows’.

scholarly journals La Lucrècia Borja de ficció en el drama d’Hugo i els seus derivats

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 100
Author(s):  
Marc Gomar Calatayud
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Family Policies ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
Gaetano Donizetti ◽  
The Real ◽  
Black Legend ◽  
The Many ◽  
Pope Alexander Vi

Resum: El drama Lucrèce Borgia de Victor Hugo confereix al personatge històric una sèrie d’atributs en sintonia amb el gust sensacionalista de l’època: en ser dona, poderosa, bella i formada. Lucrècia Borja és el millor exemple d’allò que Kristeva anomena «l’abjecte» en les Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980). Una imatge de femme fatale lligada al verí o l’incest que es popularitzarà gràcies a les nombroses obres derivades del drama: de l’òpera de Donizetti als romanços populars de manera que les característiques del personatge de ficció s’imposaran a l’històric en l’imaginari col·lectiu. Lucrècia Borja, que fins aleshores havia estat considerada un instrument al servei de les polítiques familiars, entrarà a formar part per «mèrits» propis del triangle del mal junt amb l germà, Cèsar Borja, i son pare, el papa Alexandre VI. Paraules clau: Lucrècia Borja, Victor Hugo, Gaetano Donizetti, llegenda negra, literatura de cordell, paròdia, segle XIX, Francesc Godó, abjecte Abstract: The Victor Hugo’s drama Lucrezia Borgia gives to the historical character some attributes in line with the sensationalist preferences of that time: being a female, powerful, beautiful and educated. Lucrezia Borgia is the best example of what Kristeva names «the abject» in Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980). The character is a femme fatale image linked to poison or incest and it was popularized thanks to the many works resulting from this drama. So that, the features of the fictional character prevailed to the real historical character in the popular beliefs, this happened in Donizetti's opera, but also in the chapbooks of that time. Lucrezia Borgia had previously been considered an instrument in the service for family policies, but she became part of an evil triangle, thanks to her own attitude, along with her brother, Cesare Borgia, and her father, the pope Alexander VI. Keywords: Lucrezia Borgia, Victor Hugo, Gaetano Donizetti, black legend, chapbook, parody, nineteenth century, Francesc Xavier Godó, abject

Repurposing Romantic Drama in Late-Nineteenth-Century Egypt: Najīb al-Ḥaddād’s Arabizations of Victor Hugo

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 394-424
Author(s):  
Edward Ziter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Romantic Drama

Abstract At the end of the nineteenth century, Najīb al-Ḥaddād adapted two dramas by Victor Hugo for The Egyptian Patriotic Troupe. Al-Ḥaddād rewrote Hugo’s Hernani as Ḥamdān, transferring the story from the Spanish court of 1519 to Andalucía under ‘Abd al-Raḥmān II. Les Burgraves became Tha’rāt al-‘arab (Revenge of the Arabs), and transformed from a play about Barbarossa and the Holy Roman Empire into a play about a pre-Islamic Lakhmid king’s struggle to restore unified Arab rule in the Arabian peninsula. I argue that Al-Ḥaddād’s adaptations anachronistically placed modern ideas in the Arab past—characterizing shūrā as the election of leaders, using sha‘b to mean a sovereign people, and calling for Arab cultural unity and revival. Al-Ḥaddād’s adaptations transformed the nationalism of Hugo’s drama into calls for Arab solidarity. In producing these plays, The Egyptian Patriotic Troupe embodied an Arab past overlaid with modern communal identities.

Data on the Egyptian Collection of the National Museum of Transylvanian History. The contribution of Baron Balázs Orbán to the creation of the Egyptian Collection of the Cluj History Museum

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Melinda Mitu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Near East ◽  
Hungarian Academy ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
National Museum ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Cultural Institution ◽  
Main Work ◽  
The Village ◽  
1848 Revolution

"This paper aims to highlight the contribution of the famous Hungarian historian and ethnographer of Szekler origin Balázs Orbán, born in the village of Polonița, near Odorheiu Secuiesc, to the establishment of the Egyptian Collection of the Cluj History Museum, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Baron Balázs Orbán is best known for his main work, A Székelyföld leírása, published between 1868 and 1873. Its six volumes represent a genuine encyclopedia of the region. Balázs Orbán was a prominent intellectual of the era in which he lived – he was a writer, historian, ethnographer, a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy (since 1887), politician in the Independent Party, and a participant in the 1848 revolution. He had an adventurous life, reminiscent of the romantic novels of Mór Jókai or Victor Hugo. To the latter Balázs Orbán was linked by a beautiful friendship, largely due to their shared belief in the liberal and democratic ideas of the era in which they lived. This paper aims to present the years spent by Balázs Orbán in the Orient, as well as the cultural fruits of this period. In his youth, at the age of only 19, the future Hungarian scholar made a trip for several months to the Near East. On this occasion, he acquired a series of valuable Oriental artifacts, which he later donated to the Transylvanian Museum Society, the prestigious Transylvanian cultural institution founded by Count Imre Mikó in 1859, whose collections are preserved today in the heritage of the National Museum of Transylvanian History in Cluj‑Napoca."

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