Bug-Jargal

by Victor Hugo

Overview

L'épisode qu'on va lire, et dont le fond est emprunté à la révolte des esclaves de Saint-Domingue en 1791, a un air de circonstance qui eût suffi pour empêcher l'auteur de le publier. Cependant une ébauche de cet opuscule ayant été déjà imprimée et distribuée à un nombre restreint d'exemplaires, en 1820, à une époque où la politique du jour s'occupait fort peu d'Haïti, il est évident que si le sujet qu'il traite a pris depuis un nouveau degré d'intérêt, ce n'est pas la faute de l'auteur

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412180375
Publisher:	eBooksLib
Publication date:	04/21/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	320 KB
Language:	French

About the Author

Chris Bongie is a Professor of English at Queen’s University, Kingston. He is the author of Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle and Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature, both from Stanford University Press.

Date of Birth:

February 26, 1802

Date of Death:

May 22, 1885

Place of Birth:

Besançon, France

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

Pension Cordier, Paris, 1815-18

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Victor Hugo: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Bug-Jargal

Appendix A: “Bug-Jargal” (1820)

Appendix B: “The Saint Domingue Revolt” (1845)

Appendix C: Politics and Poetics

1. Review of Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward (1823)
2. Preface to Nouvelles Odes (1824)

Appendix D: Contemporary Reviews

1. From Le Globe (Journal littéraire) (1826)
2. From Le Drapeau blanc (1826)
3. From Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle (1826)
4. From C.A. Chauvet, “Des romans de M. Victor Hugo,” Revue encyclopédique (1831)
5. From Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Les Romans de Victor Hugo,” Journal des débats (1832)

Appendix E: Historical and Cultural Sources

1. From Bryan Edwards, An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo (1797)
2. From Pamphile de Lacroix, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue (1819)
3. From Henri Grégoire, De la littérature des nègres (1808)

Appendix F: Literary Sources

1. From Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, Adonis, ou Le bon nègre (1798)
2. From Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, Zoflora; or, The Generous Negro Girl (1804)

Appendix G: Map of Saint Domingue

Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

This superb edition of Bug-Jargal, which includes a wealth of contextualizing documentation, makes Hugo’s early representations of race and revolution fully accessible to a contemporary English-language audience. Bongie’s critical introduction, translations of both the 1826 novel and the original 1820 short story, and incorporation of contemporary reviews, literary sources, and historical materials reinvigorate Hugo’s work and enable the reader to engage with it from a fresh, postcolonial perspective.” — Kathryn M. Grossman, Pennsylvania State University

“Victor Hugo’s early novel of the Haitian Revolution has taken on a new significance in our postcolonial age preoccupied with race, subaltern resistance, and hybridity. Chris Bongie provides a richly contextualized version that will appeal to historians, literary scholars, and general readers alike. It combines meticulous documentation and a provocative argument about the conservative young poet’s ambivalent rendering of this ‘struggle of giants,’ which was written at a turning point in his political development.” — David Geggus, University of Florida

“Chris Bongie gives a highly readable and accurate translation of the novel, its 1820 short-story version, and of the supporting documents. He also devotes much of the introduction and notes to demonstrating how Hugo had pieced together portions of the novel from historical sources. [The translation and choice of documents] indicate the Broadview edition’s scholarly and pedagogical uses.” — Nineteenth-Century French Studies

From the Publisher