Selected Poems of Hugo

Author: (French) Victor Hugo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-12-01
Features: Hugo (1802–1885) was a leading figure in the early 19th-century Romantic literary movement and an outstanding bourgeois democratic writer in French literary history. The dominant ideology his life's work and creative output was humanitarianism, opposition to violence, and the use of love to combat "evil." His creative career spanned over 60 years, producing 26 volumes of poetry, 20 volumes of novels, 12 volumes of plays, and 21 volumes of philosophical essays, totaling 79 volumes, adding a magnificent cultural legacy to French literature and the treasure trove of human culture. His representative works include the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, among others. Hugo experienced almost all of the major events in 19th-century France. From a young age, he admired the early French Romantic writer Chateaubriand. In 1827, he published the rhymed play Cromwell and its preface (Preface, 1827), which is known as the manifesto of the French Romantic drama movement and is one of Hugo's most important literary essays. In 1830, he wrote a Romantic play Hernani based on the theories in the preface, and its premiere marked the victory of Romanticism over Classicism. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) is one of Hugo's major Romantic novels. It tells a story set in 15th-century France using bizarre and contrasting techniques: the seemingly pious but venomous archdeacon Claude falls in love with the Gypsy girl Esmeralda before hating her, persecuting her, while the ugly but kind bell ringer Quasimodo sacrifices himself to save her. The novel exposes the hypocrisy of religion, declares the bankruptcy of asceticism, and praises the kindness, friendship, and selflessness of the lower-class laboring people, reflecting Hugo's humanitarian ideals. Les Misérables fully represents Hugo's ideological and artistic style. With exceptional artistic charm, it shows the brutal reality of the capitalist society oppressing the working people and forcing them into prostitution. However, the author firmly believed that moral persuasion was the best way to heal social disasters. Although the novel contains realistic elements, in terms of character portrayal, environmental description, the use of symbolism and contrast, it remains a masterpiece of Romanticism. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables have been adapted into films multiple times and have gained worldwide popularity, becoming classics.