Offers pedagogical techniques for teaching Victor Hugo's Les Misérables in college classrooms, including consideration of the literary market, American pop culture, childhood, the literature of Paris, utopianism, the French Revolution, adaptations, and misery. Includes maps, information on reference works, and online resources. Gives syllabus suggestions for undergraduate and graduate courses.
Michal P. Ginsburg is professor emerita of French and comparative literature at Northwestern University. Her main research areas are the nineteenth-century European novel (especially in France and England), narrative theory, and Israeli fiction. She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies, Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, and Portrait Stories; coauthor of Shattered Vessels: Memory, Identity, and Creation in the work of David Shahar; and editor of Approaches to Teaching Balzac's Old Goriot. Bradley Stephens is senior lecturer in French at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the reception and adaptation of French Romantic fiction, with a particular interest in Victor Hugo. He is the author of numerous studies and articles in this field, including Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty and a new introduction to Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and he has coedited several collections, most recently Les Misérables and Its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage, and Screen. He is currently working on a critical biography of Hugo.