Title of Thesis: THE THEME OF NATURE IN VICTOR

HUGO'S LES CONTEMPLATIONS

Nazanin Khavari, Master of Art, 2009

Thesis directed by: Professor Joseph Brami

Department of French & Italian School of

Languages, Literatures and Cultures

In Les Contemplations collection, Hugo is a real contemplator of

nature: he describes it with all its immensity, beauty and ugliness, in

different seasons and in different moments of day and night. For the

description of this nature, mineral, vegetal and animal, he applies many stylistic procedures. In demand of describing everything, he becomes an admirer of mankind with all its greatness and weakness. Description of nature is often accompanied with the ones of love. It can be paternal or of any other kind. This permits him to speak about woman, adolescence and especially of his daughter. This desire to say everything about grandiose and fearsomeness of nature makes Hugo a liberator of words and the creator of the aestheticism of totality in which sublime and grotesque are

intermingled, an aestheticism which announces Surrealism.