FRE 363: 19th & 20th Century French Poetry

Victor Hugo on Things That Matter gives English speakers the social, historical, cultural, and biographical context that is essential for enjoying the writing and art of this genius of nineteenth-century France. The book's topical organization lets readers investigate Hugo's ideas about private and personal concerns--love, children, grief, nature, God--as well as public and politically important issues--liberty and democracy, tyranny, social justice, humanity, peace, and war.
Unlike other Hugo anthologies, Victor Hugo on Things That Matter offers introductions and notes in English and includes twenty-five of Hugo's watercolors and drawings. Readers will find key Hugo texts in the original French, along with supplemental information in English.

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.

In the nineteenth century, the French lyric poets imposed their diction on the theatrical genre and thus illuminated the essence of both poetry and theatre. Ten plays by Victor Hugo, the standard-bearer of the French romantic theatre, are analyzed by Charles Affron to answer the question, "Can the dialetic form of the theatre accommodate the solitary élan of the lyric poet?" As a functional point of departure, he considers those characteristics of lyric poetry--time, voice, and metaphor--which bring us closest to the singular attitudes of Hugo and Musset. Mr. Affron discusses such topics as poetic time, the scope of analogy, theatrical and poetic rhetoric, the guises of the poet-hero, and the manner of sounding the poet's voice upon the stage.