Esteemed in France as the leading writer of Romantic dramas, Victor Hugo created a body of work that revolutionized the dramatic canon of his time. In this book, Albert W. Halsall presents the first complete treatment in English of Hugo's plays.
This valuable synthesis offers a history, plot summary, and detailed analysis of all the dramas, from Cromwel and Torquemada to the juvenilia and the epic melodrama Les Burgraves. Particular attention is given to Hugo's practical experiments in staging his own plays, which he nearly always directed himself in the 1830s. Also documented are...
Esteemed in France as the leading writer of Romantic dramas, Victor Hugo created a body of work that revolutionized the dramatic canon of his time....
'Common-sense, ' the Romantic critics told us, was all that was needed to understand and interpret literary texts. Today, we know this is not generally true. Modern criticism has joined with pre-Romantic criticism to expose common-sense as appropriate (because simple-minded), inadequate to comprehend and interpret verbal structures which are frequently 'non- common]sensical, ' anti-commonsensical, or even nonsensical.
The difference between readers today and their earlier counterparts is that we have lost the full vocabulary of criticism and the consciousness of the literary and...
'Common-sense, ' the Romantic critics told us, was all that was needed to understand and interpret literary texts. Today, we know this is not gener...
