First published in 1994, Figuring Transcendence in "Les Mis?rables" is a book-length study of Victor Hugo's Les Mis?rables. Kathryn M. Grossman's authoritative command of Hugo's work and Hugo criticism enables her to situate the novelist's masterpiece in relation both to his earlier novels--up to and including Notre-Dame de Paris--and to the poetry published during his exile under the Second Empire. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's theory of metaphor...