Les Miserables Volume Two (Wordsworth Classics)

Les Miserables Volume 2
One of the great Classics of Western Literature, Les Miserables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description. Characters such as the absurdly criminalised Valjean, the street urchin Gavroche, the rascal Thenardier, the implacable detective Javert, and the pitiful figure of the prostitute Fantine and her daughter Cosette, have entered the pantheon of literary dramatis personae.

The best-known of the French Romantic writers, Victor Hugo was a poet, novelist, dramatist, and political critic. Hugo was an avid supporter of French republicanism and advocate for social and political equality, themes that reflect most strongly in his works Les Mis?rables, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), and Le Dernier jour d'un condamn? (The Last Day of a Condemned Man). Hugo's literary works were successful from the outset, earning him a pension from Louis XVIII and membership in the prestigious Acad?mie fran?aise, and influencing the work of literary figures such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Elevated to the peerage by King Louis-Philippe, Hugo played an active role in French politics through the 1848 Revolution and into the Second and Third Republics. Hugo died in 1885, revered not only for his influence on French literature, but also for his role in shaping French democracy. He is buried in the Panth?on alongside Alexandre Dumas and ?mile Zola.<br /><br />Keith Carabine, Senior Honorary Research Fellow, University of Kent at Canterbury, and Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), is the author of The Life and Art: A Study of Conrad's 'Under Western Eyes' (1996) and the literary editor of Wordsworth Classics. He has also written on Sherwood Anderson, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Wright Morris and Harriet Beecher Stowe.<br /><br />Roger Clark is Professor of Sociology at Rhode Island College, where he has taught for twenty-nine years. To date he has published sixty-six research articles and book chapters. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University.