The Presence of the Grotesque in Les Miserables (1862), by Victor Hugo and Oliver Twist (1838), by Charles Dickens

• Grant number: 23/16241-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: August 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Daniela Mantarro Callipo
• Grantee: Mariele Brollo Cavalcante
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 25/03697-0 - La présence du grotesque dans Les misérables (1862), de Victor Hugo et Oliver Twist (1838), de Charles Dickens, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

As Wolfgang Kayser (1986) demonstrates, since the mid-fifteenth century certain artistic expressions have been called grotesque, in particular those figurative ornaments, which represent monsters and hybrid beings identified with analogous images present in ancient frescoes, which because they were found in excavations, received the designation of "grotesques", term derived from "Grotta", Italian word for "cave". Since then, numerous manifestations of the Grotesque have been observed in churches, paintings, sculptures, and later in literature. One of the great responsible for the appreciation of the grotesque in the context of literature was Victor Hugo, whose preface to the play Cromwell, published in 1827, treats the grotesque as an aesthetic category that, although marginal in ancient literature, would have the utmost relevance to the modern sensibility for representing, in its contrast with the sublime, enlargement of the limits of the traditional concept of beauty. Given the importance of the work and thought of Victor Hugo for Romanticism, one can recognize the important contribution of the writer to the appreciation of the grotesque in literature of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century novel, in its turn, also demonstrates to have incorporated the artistic innovation represented by the grotesque; considering this phenomenon, therefore, with this research it is intended to observe the manifestations of the grotesque in the works The Miserable (1862) and Oliver Twist (1838) Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, respectively, mainly materialized in the characterization of the characters of the works. In addition, we aim to investigate the function of the grotesque in the two narratives through the confrontation between the two works. For this purpose, will be consulted the theorists, Kayser (1986), Bakhtin (1986), Eco (2007), Paiva and Sodré (2009), Santos (2009), among others.