Hugo, Victor | John E. Coombes (essay date 1993)
John E. Coombes (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "State, Self and History in Victor Hugo's L'Année Terrible" in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 32, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 367-78.
[In the essay below, Coombes discusses Hugo's treatment of history and politics in L'Année terrible.]
Hugo's last major poem sequence, and perhaps the last major poetic statement of European romanticism [L'Année terrible], was written in 1870-72, throughout the historical events with which it is concerned: the Franco-Prussian war, the Commune and their aftermath. Its articulation upon those events is thus very different from that of Wordsworth's The Prelude, with its attempt at a monolithic tranquillity of retrospection upon the Revolution, or indeed—to cite a less evidently conservative/conservatory instance—Heine's Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen, generated out of the depressing yet constant condition of political exile.
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