In this first book-length study of Les Miserables, one of the most widely read novels in the world, Kathryn M. Grossman, with an authoritative command of Hugo's work and Hugo criticism, situates Les Miserables in relation both to Hugo's earlier novels - up to and including Notre-Dame de Paris - and to the poetry published during his exile under the Second Empire.

Grossman convincingly outlines Hugo's orchestration of seemingly dissonant multiple voices and overlapping motifs into the higher harmonies of a vast poetic system. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's theory of metaphor and on Thomas Weiskel's analysis of the Romantic sublime, she illustrates how the novel's motifs and structures correspond to a closely connected set of ethical, spiritual, political, and aesthetic concerns.

The intricate interweaving of characters, plot, subplots, themes, imagery, topography, and digressions in Hugo's prose masterpiece results in a completely integrated metaphorical system. Superficial chaos, Grossman argues, is deeply ordered by repeating patterns that produce a kind of literary fractal, a multilayered verbal network.

. The religious motifs in Les Miserables identify the sublime not just with utopian ideals (and the overthrow of Napoleon III's grotesque Second Empire) but with artistic death and resurrection. The novel is largely concerned with the monstrous "brutalities of progress" called revolutions that must precede the advent of heaven on earth, and Grossman traces that link to a mythos of sin and redemption, showing how the moral concerns of the plot also illuminate Hugo's aesthetics.

Les Miserables explores the tensions between heroes and scoundrels, chaos and order, law and lawlessness. Grossman painstakingly follows the novel's ethical hierarchy, from the grotesque (criminality), to the conventional (bourgeois complacency), to the sublime (sainthood), and she demonstrates how that hierarchy corresponds to two other hierarchies: the literary and the political.

Hugo creates a system of master tropes, using structures of contiguity and resemblance, metonymy and metaphor, and through such complex patterns he defines the relation between history and utopian vision, politics and poetics, genius and revolution. Grossman reveals Hugo's virtually inexhaustible meditation on the romantic sublime, his poetics of transcendence.