The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood) - Softcover

Hugo, Victor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 142095525X ISBN 13: 9781420955255

Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing, 2017

Synopsis

Though written at the beginning of the Romantic era, this remarkable French historical romance takes place in medieval Paris at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. It is there that the deformed Quasimodo has gone deaf ringing the grand church’s bells for his adoptive father Dom Claude Frollo. The severe priest, though he looks after the grotesque Quasimodo, ignores the public persecution that the man suffers whenever he leaves the Cathedral, and it is at just such a moment of vulnerability that the lovely young Gypsy Esmeralda shows Quasimodo an act of kindness that leads to his inner transformation. Though still hated by everyone, Quasimodo’s sleeping soul awakens and grows in an extraordinary conversion to the sublime, allowing him to care for and protect Esmeralda even as those who admired her come to fear and despise her. A commanding and epic melodrama fully utilizing the extremes of passion and religion in the bygone Gothic era, Hugo’s novel explores social justice through the suffering of his characters, though with a compassion and melancholy that belies the author’s conviction in the impossibility of salvation in his contemporary world. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and follows the translation of Isabel F. Hapgood.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Designed for school districts, educators, and students seeking to maximize performance on standardized tests, Webster’s paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this edition of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo was edited for students who are actively building their vocabularies in anticipation of taking PSAT®, SAT®, AP® (Advanced Placement®), GRE®, LSAT®, GMAT® or similar examinations.

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From the Inside Flap:

The story and characters in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame  have resonated with succeeding generations since its publication in 1831. It has tempted filmmakers, and most recently animators, who have exploited its dramatic content to good effect but have inevitably lost some of the grays that make the original text so compelling.
   From Victor Hugo's flamboyant imagination came Quasimodo, the grotesque bell ringer; La Esmeralda, the sensuous gypsy dancer; and the haunted archdeacon Claude Frollo. Hugo set his epic tale in the Paris of 1482 under Louis XI and meticulously re-created the
day-to-day life of its highest and lowest inhabitants. Written at a time of perennial political upheaval in France, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame  is the product of an emerging democratic sensibility and prefigures the teeming masterpiece Les Misérables, which Hugo would write thirty years later.
   He made the cathedral the centerpiece of the novel and called it Notre-Dame de Paris. (It received its popular English title at the time of its second translation in 1833.) Hugo wrote that his inspiration came from a carving of the word "fatality" in Greek that he had found in the cathedral. The inscription had been eradicated by the time the book was published, and Hugo feared that Notre-Dame's Gothic splendor might soon be lost to the contemporary fad for tearing down old buildings. Notre-Dame has survived as one of the great monuments of Paris, and Hugo's novel is a fitting celebration of it, a popular classic that is proving to be just as enduring.

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.
Jacket paintings: (front) detail from Notre Dame  by Paul Lecomte, courtesy of David David Gallery/SuperStock; (spine) Victor Hugo, 1833, by Louis Boulanger of Giraudon/Art Resource, N.Y.

About this edition

• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 142095525X
• ISBN 13: 9781420955255
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 398