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From the 1820s, forçats were widely portrayed in French culture across a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres. This thesis analyses this ‘convict tradition’, and relates it to the emergence of industrial literature in France, with its resolutely reader-centred approach. It argues that convicts acquired a central cultural importance in the nineteenth century because they embodied a form of transgressive individualism which fascinated bourgeois readers. Convicts functioned as screens onto which readers could project their own forbidden desires. The study analyses canonical novels by Sand, Balzac, Hugo and Zola alongside a large corpus of non-fiction, including biographies, penological or philanthropic texts, physiologies and travel literature. The circulation of stereotypes and stylistic tropes between these different genres shows the constant interaction between mainstream and elite writing, and the influence of literary representations on the perception of criminals, which shaped political decisions and penal policy. The first chapter of the study suggests that convicts gave a face to nineteenth-century concerns about the proliferation of the criminal classes, thereby allowing readers to explore these fears. At the same time, descriptions of crime were a source of scopophilic pleasure, allowing readers to indulge repressed transgressive desires, while partaking in a potentially subversive celebration of carnivalesque disorder. Chapter 2 shows how these dynamics inform Balzac’s writing in his ‘Vautrin cycle’, drawing readers into a game of open secrets and deferred recognition, which mirrors contemporary concerns about urban illegibility and illegitimate social promotion. Chapter 3 explores a competing tradition which portrayed convicts as sublime, betraying the ambiguity of nineteenth-century attitudes to imprisonment, which could be a sign of infamy or of martyrdom. Sublime convicts reassured readers about the human ability to overcome trials, and to attain salvation through spiritual means (ataraxia) or physical resistance (escape). These differing traditions show that narratives tended to be centred upon their readers’ concerns, which may explain why criminals themselves were discouraged from writing. Chapter 4 presents the obstacles to convict self-expression as well as various attempts by inmates to ‘write back’, culminating with Genet’s and Charrière’s subversive reappropriation of literary discourse. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which the interplay between political events, commercial imperatives, literary evolutions (the rise of the detective novel) and new cultural practices like the cinema changed twentieth-century representations of convicts. This thesis analyses a large corpus of understudied material and fills a gap in existing scholarship, but more importantly it uses convicts to explore nineteenth-century reading practices, and to probe cultural fault lines in post-revolutionary French society. Convicts exemplify the ambiguity of nineteenth-century attitudes to social marginality, and highlight the conflicted nature of bourgeois identity. Their portrayal also draws attention to the important structural changes undergone by the literary field from the 1830s onwards, which paved the way for the advent of mass culture in the twentieth century.

in the follovina pages I have set out to discover what English critics of the nineteenth century thought of the works of Victor Hugo* It has not been my intention to study the extent to which the general public of the period were acquainted with his works either directly or through the medium of translations but to confine myself to an enquiry into the reactions of the more cultivated minds of the century to the writings of the great Frenchman. Indeed it would be futile to consider the influence of the works of Hugo on the English public generally, during the nineteenth century for they had none. The Poetical works were in many cases not made available to them until years after their original publications and even then only a small minority would be able to read them. There were some translations of the poems, e.g. Reynold's "Songs of Twilight" ("Les Chants du Crepuscule") but the translations were Inevitably but a poor shadow of the original. There were several adaptations of the plays but as I have shown in a previous thesis "Victor Hugo on the English Stage, most of them bore little resemblance except in plot to the original work., In rmany cases the public did not even know nor were they always told, that the piece was founded on a drama by Hugo. The novels, of course were much more widely read by the general public and numerous translations were made, but in most instances English versions were reduced to an exalting story the ethical and Sociological purpose of the work being forgotten The works of Hugo were however read and studied by a large number of eminent English critics of the nineteenth century, Numerous quotations will be found from the articles of such men as H. Southerns, G. Moir, G.H. Lewes, J.H. McCarthy, G. Colvin, A.C. Swinburne, E. Dowden, J. Morley, R.L. Stevenson, Roden Noel, F.W.H. Myers, Matthew Arnold, W.H. Pollock, G. Saintsbury, C. Vaughan, W.E. Henley, Mrs Oliphant, G.B. Smith, J. Cappon, P.T. Marzials, R. Buchanan, J. Forster and J.P. Nichol. These men among others made a definite attempt to evaluate the works of Hugo, and their opinions are worth studying as giving a clue to 'the attitude adopted by the more enlightened. literary minds of the century towards the work of Hugo This I have attempted to do, and in doing It Ihave incorporated into the text the exact words of the critics in the form of quotations in the belief that this is the best way of presenting a true and clear picture of English opinions of Hug's works during the period under survey. In the Preface to her book "English opinions of French Poets (1660,. 1750)" in which she sets out to do in a general way for the late seventeen and early eighteenth centuries what I have tried to do in a more particular way for the nineteenth. Miss R.H H Wollstein writes as follows: It is the judgment of this time that is the subject of our study and the Individual opinions that form it must be left to speak for themselves, I have therefore collected such opinions as are Important for our purpose*" This seems to me to be the most scientific method in dealing with the subject, and absolves the writer from any possible charge of tampering with the evidence. In order to make the narrative more continuous and to avoid breaks in the thread of the argument It ls sometimes tempting to state ones conclusions and to leave the reader to sift the evidence for himself. I have sedulously avoided doing this In the belief that in a work of this kind accuracy Is of the utmost importance* The method I have adopted in treating the subject Is to take each of the works of Hugo, poetry, drama, novels, miscellaneous prose works, and to study the reactions of the critics to each separate work drawing together in a final chapter the conclusions to which these separate studies have brought me. In presenting the material I have usually preferred to study each facet of the problem in turn stating one side of the case before proceeding to a consideration of the other. I have thus brought together all the unfavourable criticism of a work before presenting the favourable criticisms. In this way I believe a better picture can be drawn of the general reactions. to the works. In the case of the smaller works where the amount of evidence is restricted, I have sometimes used the chronological method as being the most satisfactory. As the present work purports to be a study of Hugo in the light of English criticism and opinion I have taken no account of the many French critics who during the nineteenth century, contributed articles on Hugo to English journals. One of tha first Critics to introduce Hugo to the English was Stendhal in the "London and "New Monthly' magazines. Other French critics whose names will not be found in the present survey are Gabriel Honods Jules Janin, D. Nisards, Camille Barrero, H. Ceard, Paul Bourget Their opinions are Interesting especially those of Stendhal who gave Hugo a very unfavourable start in England, but do not fall within the scope of the present works.

Abstract: Franz Liszt’s symphonic poems Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo and Mazeppa portray expressions of heroic masculinity and creative genius in the nineteenth century. Both compositions are based on historical figures whose lives were reimagined to emphasize the larger socio-cultural meanings of what it means to be a man, a hero, and a genius in the Romantic era. In the introduction, I contextualize my examination of how Liszt’s Tasso and Mazeppa emerged within the nineteenth-century debates over the meaning and merits of program music. This discussion leads to my methodological approach, which draws from Lydia Goehr’s concept of doubleness. I specifically adopt from this theoretical framework the idea that tensions and contradictions retain power by remaining unresolved. I then relate this to Liszt’s writings on program music, which emphasize the need for both formalist musical structures (e.g., form, thematic material, harmony) and extra-musical content. Chapter one continues with the idea of doubleness by closely examining how tensions exist in discourses of masculinity and genius. I show that the men who were considered great and heroic during the Romantic era often exhibit traits of passive suffering, a concept that also relates to perceptions of the creative genius and his relationship to the whims of inspiration. Chapters two and three centre on the tension in Romantic-era reimagining(s) of Torquato Tasso’s legend. While Tasso’s poetry remained important—and relevant from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century and beyond—the myth surrounding his suffering, incarceration, and posthumous recognition became a potent theme to Romantic artists. Chapter two considers the biographies of Tasso that emphasize the tension in his character. He is a genius: both weak and exhibiting joy and melancholy. I then take these double relationships and show how Goethe and Byron portray the pitfalls and strengths of existing with such tension. Chapter three builds upon my discussion in chapter two and offers an interpretation of Liszt’s symphonic poem. I provide a close reading of the accompanying preface, which outlines the same tensions other writers of the period identify. My close reading of the preface guides my analysis of Tasso, where I focus on the tension that exists through form, harmony, thematic material and motive gestures. This close reading provides an interpretation that emphasizes the tension between suffering, triumph, and heroic legacy. Chapters four and five examine doubleness in the popular Mazeppa legend. In chapter four, I introduce “the” historic Mazeppa to contrast it to the legend that grew around him. Mazeppa was a Cossack Hetman known for switching his allegiance to Peter the Great. Yet in western Europe, Mazeppa was known for his legendary ride across the steppes of the Ukraine. His legend became solidified through the writings of Voltaire and, especially, Lord Byron. Over the course of the nineteenth-century, Mazeppa came to symbolize the heroic suffering of the genius. Central to my interpretation of this legend is the idea of tension: Mazeppa is physically bound but mentally free. I include a close reading of Victor Hugo’s “Mazeppa,” the poem Liszt uses as the program, to show how sensitive Liszt was to the symbolic meanings of the legend. Musically, I examine how form, thematic transformation, musical gestures, and harmony help contribute to an interpretation of Mazeppa that exists in tension: bound and free. The summary and conclusion provide a brief description of the dissertation, returning to the key points that emphasize Liszt’s use of doubleness as a way to interpret the legends of Tasso and Mazeppa. The dissertation concludes with a brief discussion of Liszt’s symphonic poem Prometheus as a way to extend my theoretical framework and analysis beyond the scope of this dissertation.

Ever since the 16th century, the character of Lucrezia Borgia has captivated and titillated the imagination of countless artists, novelists, and playwriters. Daughter of Pope Alexander VI and later Duchess of Ferrara, she is known in popular culture for being a personification of beauty, seductiveness, and unlimited ambition. This thesis journeys through literary and painted representations of Lucrezia Borgia from the 16th to the 21st century, exploring each portrait as means to exert control over Lucrezia’s femininity. If the portraits dating from within her lifetime are examined as the means to idealize her figure and present it as an exemplary model of female propriety and respectability, nineteenth-century productions turn her into an ambiguous character. As her body becomes the site of a conflagration between beauty and vice, love and ambition, Lucrezia is turned into a mythological character employed as a moral cautionary tale. Victor Hugo’s play Lucrece Borgia, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and 20th-century cinematic examples are then used to discuss the appropriation and exploitation of Lucrezia for political and economic objectives first, and consumeristic purposes later. Lastly, the commission of a glass case to display a relic of her hair is analyzed for the first time as the ultimate step in this transformation of Lucrezia from a historical figure to a secular saint of femininity and sexuality. Employing theoretical frameworks drawn from contemporary feminist theory, this thesis ultimately proposes a reading of Lucrezia as a case-study to access to gain access to a wider range of issues concerning female representation.

In the nineteenth century, amidst the rise of anti-Catholicism in the Western world, narratives served as a persuasive medium to influence the reading public. Anti-clerical sentiment was conveyed in various forms of text, often depicting the Catholic convent as a place of sinister confinement. This thesis offers an alternative representation of the French nineteenth-century convent. Considering the prevailing social, economic, and political environment in France, along with the conception of social space, I argue that the convent represents a place of sanctuary and opportunity for some women and girls. Further, in view of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, I examine the representation of the convent as a place for rebirth. Likewise, in analyzing George Sand's autobiography Histoire de ma vie, I explore the representation of the convent as a haven for reviving creativity. Thus, by close reading and critical examination of these literary representations, I contend that the nineteenth-century convent can provide a place of refuge.

From 1831 to 1836, Victor Hugo and Louise Bertin collaborated on an opera titled La Esmeralda. For Hugo, it would be the only opera libretto he would ever write, a mere footnote to his collection of widely admired novels, plays, and poetry; for Bertin, however, it would become her most important work, yet seemingly destined to fade into obscurity like so many great pieces of art. Using Schenkerian analysis, this thesis uncovers the tonal and voice-leading structure of the first act of La Esmeralda. A study of this nature, which operates from the premise that forms as large and complex as opera can be examined in terms of a large-scale structure, is valuable because it sheds new light on the correlation of tonal structure and dramatic organization. Through these methods, Act I of La Esmeralda is read as a background progression from D major (with F# kopfton) to F major, composing-out an F#/F♮ dichotomy introduced in the overture. With reference to several musical-symbolic ideas - including the representation of virtue through the pitch F#, the key of Notre-dame's bells - it is shown how the musical structure of Act I expresses the Hugolian themes of fate and decay.

Despite numerous theories over the last few centuries and ample scholarship exploring the sublime and the grotesque as independent elements in literature, scholars seem to have ignored linking these two elements in their analyses of and critical responses to the modern novel. Little scholarship exists to decipher and to support why together the grotesque and the sublime are essential characteristics of the modern novel—specifically, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)—and how they become necessary in tandem to illuminate the human condition, to personify the Other, and to evaluate Mick Kelly’s Bildungsroman.In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers cultivates these qualities to create the perfect amalgam of timeless despair and loneliness amidst the struggle to survive. The Other, like the sublime and the grotesque, highlights simultaneously the oppositions and the similarities in people only to suggest that people become the Other when this examination occurs, while the human condition, like the sublime and the grotesque, yields many definitions, theories, and differences, but as these conditions materialize, they significantly affect responses to stimuli and to people and provoke readers to consider why humans are the way they are and why they behave as they do.In order to establish these links and continue a discussion regarding their use in tandem, Chapter 1 explicates the theories of Victor Hugo and Thomas Mann, two writers who see purpose in the unification of the grotesque and the sublime in modern literature, and connects these theories in terms of McCullers’s characters, landscapes, and situations. Chapter 2 focuses on the novel’s female teenage Other Mick Kelly and the unpredictability of her adolescence and employs Hugo’s and Mann’s theories to inspect Kelly’s experiences, uniting the grotesque and the sublime within Kelly's Bildungsroman. Chapter 3 briefly defines the Other and identifies some of McCullers’s male characters who most exemplify the Other—John Singer, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, and Jake Blount—and analyzes their relationships and supports the idea that Other also unifies the grotesque and the sublime. Chapter 4 presents four theories of the human condition and evaluates similar conditions found in the novel, further supporting the belief that the grotesque, the sublime, the Other, and the human condition all represent literary elemental dependents in a modern novel.The conclusion considers Robert C. Wiles’s photograph The Most Beautiful Suicide as a modern visual example, thereby depicting a link between the sublime and the grotesque.

Out of Place examines the lesser-known photography of three canonical authors, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Pierre Loti, during their respective exiles from France, whether involuntary, self-imposed, or self-constructed. By reading the photographs taken of and by these authors in dialogue with their writing, including journal entries, correspondence, fiction, and theoretical writings, I explore the motif of exile which encompasses themes equally characteristic of the then nascent medium: loss, absence, and nostalgia. I argue that photography lent itself well in expressing and mediating the disjunctions of exile and offered an ideal medium for these writer-photographers to construct their artistic selfhood via images of marginalization and absence. Locating exile as a metaphor for creative genius and the exile as an avatar of artistic identity within Romantic-era representations, I look at how this metaphor evolves across different artistic movements and mediums as it shifts from a metaphor to a reality and becomes a trope for representation vis-à-vis questions of impermanence and distance. While prior scholarship has primarly considered exile in terms of the alienating effects of modern culture fostered by a climate of urbanization and capitalism, I study artists who experienced geographic dislocation at critical moments in nineteenth-century France’s history and who represented their placelessness through the lens of photography. Drawing upon the work of Walter Benjamin, Geoffrey Batchen, Eduardo Cadava, and Richard Terdiman, among others, I show that exilic absence mirrors the spectral qualities of photography and its disconcerting crisis of history and memory that brings the past, the elsewhere, and the self within reach, while at the same time, forcing the viewer to realize his/her distance from these ideals. Through the motif of exile, and the affinities it shares with photography, Hugo, Zola, and Loti explore representation as absence made present, providing a crucial lens for re-framing these writers’ aesthetics of representation, and more largely, the complex relationship between literature and photography during this time. This interdisciplinary study thus challenges established notions about the relationship between these two mediums as either rivals or allies in the quest for realist aesthetics and instead shows how the camera served as a tool for artistic self-expression and self-representation for these displaced authors.

When Louis-Napoleon staged a coup d’état and overthrew the French Second Republic in 1851, renowned French author and republican politician Victor Hugo escaped into exile on the British isle of Guernsey. He remained in exile until the republic was reestablished in 1870. This thesis examines the works he published during the period, including the political pamphlet Napoléon le Petit, two poetry collections—Les Chȃtiments and Les Contemplations—and his magnum opus novel Les Misérables. Victor Hugo used these writings to remain politically active, even while in exile, by consistently promoting the cause of republicanism in France. His politically charged writings helped shape the course of French politics in the 1860s, ultimately contributing to the fall of the French Second Empire and the restoration of the Republic.

This paper examines Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal (1826) and considers why a text that focuses on French losses incurred during the Haitian Revolution in the colony then known as Saint Domingue also opens and closes its narrative with reference to the French Revolution. Utilizing Dominick LaCapra's understanding of "acting out" and "working through" trauma, as well as Freud's distinction of "conscious" and "unconscious" loss, I argue that the novel functions as an attempted "working through" of the conscious loss of French lives and colonial wealth in Saint Domingue. It is by drawing the violence of both revolutions into comparison that Bug-Jargal produces evidence of an unconscious loss also at work in the text: a general destabilization of French identity as the meaning of "whiteness" is rendered uncertain in Saint Domingue, and the privileges of the aristocracy are eliminated in France. In its struggle to reinvest the figure of the French aristocrat with discursive, racial, and social authority, Hugo's novel inadvertently exposes that its French narrator acts in imitation of other races; that possibilities for life exist outside of the aristocrat's death-driven narrative; and that the French aristocrat's limited insight as narrator causes the voices of others, collaborative and contradictory, to reveal their own losses resulting from encounters with the French.

This study explores the journey of the poetic speaker in the structure and themes of Victor Hugo's Les Contemplations, told by the vehicle of memory in recording the memoirs of his soul. Following an atemporal format, the poems in this work present a chronicle of Hugo's time in exile expressed in profoundly lyric verse immortalizing the epic and representative quest of his poet. Beginning with the origins of his poetic gifting and the goal of his quest, the tradition of epic poets already finished with their journey, the power of the poetic word and studying his intermediary relationship to the worldly and spiritual realms, the manifestation of this relationship in the structure of Les Contemplations and the poet's ultimate ascent to the frontiers of hidden truth. The poet traverses through his poetry and experiences a transformation from an allegorical figure to a symbolic figure in this epic account. Although it has been argued that Les Contemplations is an allegory, in studying the speaker of the poems as he progresses, the poet becomes a symbolic figure in his ascent.

In an attempt to develop a technologically and socially relevant design for the San Diego Central Library, this thesis asks the question, “How can the architecture of a library reflect and respond to man’s present-day relationship with information?” Through historical analysis using Victor Hugo’s text Ceci Tuera Cela as a point of departure, an examination of how the architecture of the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris and the beaux-arts library Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève reflect man’s relationship with information in Paris during their respective periods of construction (circa. 1215 and 1845) will be used to inform an analysis of our present-day relationship with information and its translation into architectural form.In contrast to the historical precedents, our present-day relationship with information is characterized by our use of rapidly developing digital information technologies like the computer and the Internet. As these technologies continue to make our relationship with information more interactive and interconnected, these same technological innovations are calling into question the continuing relevance of the public library and contributing to a phenomenon called “information anxiety.” This thesis posits that the design of the San Diego Central Library should reflect the interconnection of information and the patron’s interaction with it in an inspiring and helpful way, while combating the post-modern conditions of disorientation and information anxiety through clear, centralized organization. The infrastructure of the building will afford maximum possible flexibility to account for the mutable nature of technology, in an acknowledgment that “rapid and far-reaching” change is the dominant paradigm for the future.