Abstraction, transformation, consciousness: Character and generic innovation in the novels of Victor Hugo

The success of the nineteenth-century realist novel has led to a devalorization of the novels of Victor Hugo, whose non-realist approach to characterization has often been criticized. My dissertation argues that rather than being a weakness of his works, Hugo's characterizations contribute significantly to literary history by promoting forms of generic innovation. Through an analysis of Hugo's five major novels, from Notre Dame de Paris (1831) to Quatrevingt-treize (1874), I explore how a seemingly negative move, the rejection of individual identity as a structuring principle of novelistic practice, can have positive outcomes for generic form, stretching the boundaries of the novel in the directions of poetry and the theater while developing the genre's ideological potential as a tool for the promotion of social change.;My analyses of individual novels are structured around central principles of portraiture---abstraction, transformation, and a focus on consciousness as a narrative site---that facilitate formal and thematic innovations. In Notre Dame de Paris and Quatrevingt-treize, Hugo employs his principle of abstraction to generate conceptual "dramas" of character through which groups of central figures signify collectively, promoting philosophical or socio-political reflections. In Les Miserables, Hugo innovates ideologically by staging a series of symbolic transformations that unfold in a chain reaction, generating a fictive mechanism for social change. At the same time, he develops a poetic approach to interiority that emphasizes broad, collective experiences over individual concerns. In Les Travailleurs de la mer and L'Homme qui rit, Hugo employs his characters' minds as sites for collective forms of metaphysical inquiry and contemplative states of reverie that expand the novel's thematic potential while incorporating prose poetry into its form. At the same time, his unusual poetics of consciousness implicates the reader in the mental processes being described, blurring the boundaries that normally separate readers from fictive characters.;Hugo's novels expand the signifying functions of literary characters while anticipating the modernist tendency to reject the notion of a coherent individual subject. By dethroning the fictive individual in order to isolate and investigate broader life processes, Hugo earns a place in the history of the modern French novel.