Victor Hugo, L'Homme qui rit [The Man Who Laughs]

Emma Bielecki (King's College London)

Ed. by Jennifer Yee, University of Oxford
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.05: French Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth-Century , 1800-1900.
Vol. editors: David Elwyn Evans (University of St Andrews), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Elisabeth Gerwin (University of Lethbridge), Nigel Harkness (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield), Jennifer Yee (University of Oxford)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1869

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Recommended Reading

Tasked with reviewing

L’Homme qui rit

[

The Man who Laughs

; also translated as

By Order of the King

] for the prestigious French periodical the

Revue des deux mondes

in 1869, the journalist Louis Etienne noted in a formulation which strives awkwardly for tactfulness that Hugo’s latest novel “ne restera sans doute pas les pages qui vivront toujours pour être l’honneur de cet exil” [will doubtless not remain the pages that will live forever to the honour of this exile’] (967). Etienne managed to spend most of his article avoiding talking about the novel itself; when he did it was with an attitude compounded of bafflement and boredom, suggesting that the balance of Hugo’s mind had been upset by his many years in exile (he had left France in 1851 following Louis Napoléon’s…

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1680 words

Citation: Bielecki, Emma . "L'Homme qui rit". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 December 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=21503, accessed 07 May 2024.]

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