Bradley Stephens – författare

Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty

Exploring the enduring popularity of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, this collection offers analysis of both the novel itself and its adaptations. In spite of a mixed response from critics, Les Misérables instantly became a global bestseller. Since its successful publication over 150 years ago, it has traveled across different countries, cultures, and media, giving rise to more than 60 international film and television variations, numerous radio dramatizations, animated versions, comics, and stage plays. Most famously, it has inspired the world's longest running musical, which itself has generated a wealth of fan-made and online content. Whatever its form, Hugo’s tale of social injustice and personal redemption continues to permeate the popular imagination. This volume draws together essays from across a variety of fields, combining readings of Les Misérables with reflections on some of its multimedia afterlives, including musical theater and film from the silent period to today's digital platforms. The contributors offer new insights into the development and reception of Hugo's celebrated classic, deepening our understanding of the novel as a work that unites social commentary with artistic vision and raising important questions about the cultural practice of adaptation.

Victor Hugo's eminence as a writer is bolstered by his reputation for unbridled ambition, prolific talent, and virile sexuality, yet his work is deeply uncomfortable with these aggrandized notions of what it means to be a man. Rereading some of Hugo's most famous writing alongside lesser-known texts, Bradley Stephens reveals how the author of Les Misérables contests normative ideas of manhood in ways that are surprising and urgent for gender studies today. Although Hugo recognized the allure of 'greatness', his writing knowingly resists the patriarchal clichés that were being fastened onto his public image even before he was laid to rest in the Paris Panthéon as one of France's grands hommes in 1885. Hugo channelled nature's spontaneity to understand all forms and types as fluid, not fixed, and his aversion to categorical viewpoints and established hierarchies necessarily questions the binary logic of gender and its naturalization of men's social dominance.

Victor Hugo's eminence as a writer is bolstered by his reputation for unbridled ambition, prolific talent, and virile sexuality, yet his work is deeply uncomfortable with these aggrandized notions of what it means to be a man. Rereading some of Hugo's most famous writing alongside lesser-known texts, Bradley Stephens reveals how the author of Les Misérables contests normative ideas of manhood in ways that are surprising and urgent for gender studies today. Although Hugo recognized the allure of 'greatness', his writing knowingly resists the patriarchal clichés that were being fastened onto his public image even before he was laid to rest in the Paris Panthéon as one of France's grands hommes in 1885. Hugo channelled nature's spontaneity to understand all forms and types as fluid, not fixed, and his aversion to categorical viewpoints and established hierarchies necessarily questions the binary logic of gender and its naturalization of men's social dominance.

Exploring the enduring popularity of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, this collection offers analysis of both the novel itself and its adaptations. In spite of a mixed response from critics, Les Misérables instantly became a global bestseller. Since its successful publication over 150 years ago, it has traveled across different countries, cultures, and media, giving rise to more than 60 international film and television variations, numerous radio dramatizations, animated versions, comics, and stage plays. Most famously, it has inspired the world's longest running musical, which itself has generated a wealth of fan-made and online content. Whatever its form, Hugo’s tale of social injustice and personal redemption continues to permeate the popular imagination. This volume draws together essays from across a variety of fields, combining readings of Les Misérables with reflections on some of its multimedia afterlives, including musical theater and film from the silent period to today's digital platforms. The contributors offer new insights into the development and reception of Hugo's celebrated classic, deepening our understanding of the novel as a work that unites social commentary with artistic vision and raising important questions about the cultural practice of adaptation.

The greatest work of one of France's greatest writers, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables seemed stylistically and even politically out of date when it was published in 1862. But its indictment of injustice, concern for those suffering in misery, unapologetic embrace of the ideals of the French Revolution, and memorable characters have proved irresistible to readers for a century and a half. The novel's length, multiple narratives, and encyclopedic digressiveness make it a pleasure to read but a challenge to teach, and this volume is designed to address the needs of instructors in a variety of courses that include the novel in excerpts or as a whole.Part 1 of the volume, ""Materials,"" provides guidance on editions in French and in English translation, biographies, criticism, and maps. Part 2, ""Approaches,"" contains essays that discuss the novel's conceptions of misère, sexuality, and the politics of the time and that demonstrate techniques for teaching the context of its literary market, adaptations, place in popular culture, and relation to other novels of its time.

Victor Hugo (1802-85) is an icon of French culture. He achieved immense success as a poet, dramatist and novelist, and he was also elected to both Houses of the French Parliament. Leading the Romantic campaign against artistic tradition and defying the Second Empire in exile, he became synonymous with the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. His State funeral in Paris made headlines across the world and his breadth of appeal remains evident today, not least thanks to the popularity of his bestseller, Les Misérables.This biography, the first in English for over twenty years, provides a concise but comprehensive study of Hugo’s monumental body of work within the context of his dramatic life. Hugo wrestled with family tragedy and personal misgivings while being pulled into the turmoil of the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon’s Empire to the rise of France’s Third Republic. Throughout these twists of fate, he sensed a natural order of collapse and renewal. This unending cycle of creation shaped his ideas about freedom and roused his imagination, which he channelled into his prolific writing and other outlets like drawing. Such vigour also suggests, as Bradley Stephens argues, that Hugo was too restless to sit comfortably on the pedestal of literary greatness.

Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty