Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles [The Legend of Centuries]

Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe (University of Oxford)

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: Edward Forman (University of Bristol), 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 1859

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

La Légende des siècles is a verse epic charting the history of humanity, which was published in three series at quite different points in Hugo’s life. Each series encompasses the whole of history from beginning to end and consists of self-contained poems narrating specific episodes, many of which are either fictional or little-known, presented as embodying the spirit of their age. When Hugo started work on this project in the 1850s, he was a successful lyric poet living in Guernsey, in exile from Second Empire France. The epic genre was still weighed down by neoclassical conventions, but Hugo reinvented it by fragmenting history into short dense narratives and introducing techniques drawn from other genres, p…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2123 words

Citation: Lunn-Rockliffe, Katherine. "La Légende des siècles". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 March 2017 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11231, accessed 25 November 2024.]

Save this article