Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2001

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Faraci, Mary

Abstract

All narratives in which the human image is presented establish an interconnectedness of time and space, what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the chronotope. When Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables, he drew upon a historical chronotope originating in the narratives that accompanied the spread of Christianity, and which found its purest distillate in the genre of hagiography---the narrating of the lives of saints. When the mode of sacred time established in the conventionally brief hagiologic narrative, which depended on a linear progression having unity with God as its end, is integrated into the extended form of the novel, it finds itself at odds with the ubiquitous adventure time---the random disjunctions of time and space without which there is no plot. The delineated spaces of roads and gardens in Les Miserables serve to concretize the mediation between these two modes of time, resulting in the ordinary time of the novel.

Extent

84 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2001.|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FADT12796

Format

pdf

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