byjuxtaposition - Tumblr blog

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I can't get over the Louvre's recent restoration of Liberty Leading the People, so I made this quick gif to show the before and after.

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well its barricade day and i haven’t drawn NOT for work for actual ages, so here’s an ancient thing i drew back in 2016. and i’m still pretty cool with the result so

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(Barricade Day 2018)

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Incredibly excited to share that my PhD thesis - Same-Sex Desire and Intimacy in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Its Adaptations: A Creative and Critical Study - is now available online and should be accessible without an academic login!!

I have been working on various iterations of this project for almost a decade now and I am so proud that this is what it has culminated in (so far - further schemes in the works, always).

Most of all, I'm beyond grateful to the fandom for all of the input and encouragement and resources and enthusiasm I've received over the years - this thesis literally would not (could not!) exist without you and I'm chuffed to bits to finally be able to give something back. I hope it still means as much to you guys as it has to me all this time.

Enjoy!!!

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ExR Interview with George Blagden

George very kindly exchanged e-mails with me while I was working on my dissertation, which focused on Enjolras and Grantaire’s relationship in Les Misérables. I basically wanted to see if it was viable to view their interactions as being indicative of something more intimate than friendship, and extended that to examine the reception of their relationship in online fandom, which is where George comes in! He asked to share this interview on Twitter - his answers are great at exploring an actor’s process, as well as being a really fantastic and valuable contribution to what I was writing about; I’m super excited about sharing his thoughts and I hope you all enjoy reading them!

Keep reading

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New Hugo statue jumpscare -

I got to visit Hauteville House in Guernsey recently! Here are a few pics (taken on my very old shitty phone), my experience of the house and its garden, and some my favourite info from the tour.

First of all, HH is MASSIVE - five floors, and though each room really left a lasting impression on me, I could not describe the layout of the house or even specify which room is on which floor if my life depended on it. It's just so big!! Hugo lived there for most of his time in exile in Guernsey (after being expelled from France, Belgium, and Jersey in quick succession), along with his surviving family members at times. The house has stayed in the family from when Hugo lived in it, so it's been kept as it was when he lived there. In the Information Centre in Guernsey, there are old black and white photos alongside newer colour photos of different rooms and they're virtually identical. Recent restoration works are now finished; I was all booked to visit Guernsey in mid-2020 upon the house's reopening while still working on my Les Mis PhD, but obviously travel Did Not Happen. From the front, the building is flat and fairly unobtrusive, which is DECEPTIVE. I was familiar with the madness I was about to encounter inside (in part from Jean Baptiste Hugo's - Hugo's great, great grandson's - recently published book of frankly stunning new photographs of the house) and it still blew me away.

You have to book a guided tour in order to visit because the house is preserved exactly as Hugo decorated it, so literally everything is An Item (no touching anything except the banisters). Tours are £12 pp for the hour as of May 2024 (free disabled & carers' tickets available, as well as other concessions) and I believe there are about 10 places available on each tour. The guides are incredibly knowledgeable, and tours are available in French or English. You reserve a place in advance, pay when you get there, and leave bags in lockers in the little reception area/gift shop (a few books and a nice selection of very neat postcards; none of the snowglobes with Hugo's face in them that you get in the Maison de Hugo in Paris). I could have listened to our guide talk for about three more hours, easy - if I'd had more time in Guernsey, I'd have booked another tour. Anyone can visit the garden for free during opening hours too; I started looking up Guernsey property prices because imagine just being able to hang out in Hugo's garden any time you like???

HH was the only place Hugo ever owned - he rented rooms/apartments otherwise - specifically so he couldn't be exiled from Guernsey. He thought he would die there. He stayed even after being pardoned. He decorated the entire place over the course of three years. His family's rooms are now the staff's private offices, as Hugo didn't uh... enforce his tastes there. His family wasn't allowed in some of his rooms upstairs. Also on Hauteville is a smaller building down the road, now a private residence, where Hugo lived when he first arrived in Guernsey.

I've visited his Place des Vosges house in Paris before and, in hindsight, it's wild how much of a museum it feels like, with it's big open rooms and display cases and exhibits, in comparison to HH. HH really feels like Hugo's in a far more profound way, which I should have anticipated but really wasn't expecting. I can't stand the man, I've spent nearly 10 years writing about him, which is nine years too many, I'm not a particularly emotional or tearful person, but I felt really quite moved at times, spending time in this space.

The first room you're taken into during the tour is on the ground floor and is relatively tasteful tbh - dark red painted walls, portraits of Hugo and his family around the room, with a focus on Léopoldine, and including Hugo's artwork from some of his travels and a collage by his son Charles. Massive billiards table in the middle of the room, and a sweet grandfather clock.

Also downstairs is a dining room, which showcases the way Hugo repurposed unexpected objects to create A Vision; the table is made from a door, wooden panelling on the walls is made from a dismantled chest of drawers and chair legs, the sofa is Turkish rugs. There's carpet on the ceiling. There are a lot of convex mirrors. One wall with a mirror hanging on it is actually a secret door that opens up to reveal a darkroom Charles used to develop his photographs. There's also a long hallway with the walls and ceilings absolute covered in porcelain plates.

One room features a wooden carving over the door - EXILIUM VITA EST - exile is life (would make a sick tattoo). There's also a great wooden throne with a chain across the arms. The chain isn't there to stop visitors from sitting in the chair. Hugo put the chain there. The chair itself is carved with, e.g., his father's name and, if I'm remembering rightly, an old king's name. It symbolises how not only do the dead Hugos not join the living Hugos at the dining table, nor does empire nor monarchy have a place at the dining table. He really believes in subtlety in his home decor, evidently.

The whole house is a movement from darkness to light; the downstairs rooms and staircases are very dark, almost oppressively so, with dark woods and colours and very little natural light. As you move up through the house, the colours gradually become lighter and there are more and more windows everywhere, until you reach the glass room on the top floor of the house, where Hugo wrote looking out over St Peter Port - where he finished writing Les Mis. On clear days, you can see France. Our guide talked a lot about how Hugo believed it was necessary to have one in order to appreciate the other - the sublime and the grotesque working together, etc. His library, featuring a selection of books (e.g., encyclopaedias, the Bible, his own works, some Dickens - in French of course) from his 1,100-tome collection, is in a particularly dark hallway that you have to pass through (knowledge) in order to reach the lighter rooms (illumination). Literally every detail in the house is symbolic like this.

Among the upstairs rooms, there's the red room and the blue room (pictured). These feature a lot of chinoiserie (some details pictured), which Hugo and his contemporaries were into, though he never travelled to Asia. The blue room is one of the calmest in the house, and where you really start to see the movement toward the light. There's a conservatory on these lower upstairs floors too, with a beautiful view of Castle Cornet, one of Hugo's evening walks, and Havelet Bay, where he'd often swim. Nowadays, they dress up fire a cannon every day at noon from the castle, which is very fun.

Hugo's "bedroom" is also upstairs. He expected to die in Guernsey and staged his deathbed with a tiny white skull on top. There's a wooden figure of the Virgin Mary, which he whittled himself, on top of one of the ceiling lights. The other half of the room features church pews and a table and chairs laid out as a courtroom - his judgement. The drama.

I say "bedroom" because Hugo actually slept in a tiny yellow room off the glass room, on a red sofa-like bed that's so close to the ground it's virtually on the floor. The room is so minimalist that there are panels built into the walls so none of his clothes or other belongings were visible. One of the wooden wall panels features a scene of a man presenting the head of a dragon - who bears a remarkable resemblance to Napoleon - to a princess. Hugo painted these himself. On the wall between the glass room and his actual bedroom is perhaps his most famous piece of art; a hanged man, whose Hugo's protests against the death penalty couldn't save.

Another detail to note is that the man put his initials EVERYWHERE. If I had stopped to count every single instance of VH around the house, I would still be there. This ranges from tiny gold-painted carvings into wooden parts of the walls to a gigantic H made out of delftware tiles taking up a centre third of an entire room's wall to great green trellises in the conservatory spelling out VH in different reconfigurations (VH next to each other, V overlaying H, etc.).

The garden at HH is beautiful. It's long with lots of leafy bushes and trees, and loads of flowers blooming (even a few lilacs hanging on right at the end of May!), and herbs and vegetables at the end. There's a gigantic oak tree Hugo planted in hope of a United States of Europe. The house also looks completely different from the back (pictured) to its plain face at the front; it's the back that really feels like HH.

My overall impression of HH is the sheer scale of the intricate details everywhere (and how much our guide knew about absolutely everything in every single room); everything in the house is So Much on both large and small scales. It's mad to me that he decorated the entire house in just three years - it's taken me nearly half a year to deal with a mould problem in and repaint my tiny bedroom. I could've spent a year just looking at all the stuff everywhere.

Guernsey is tiny and Hugo was all over it, but some other things of interest are Victoria Tower where he and Juliette Drouet used to meet (you ask for the key at the museum in Candie Gardens and they just let you go off with it and let yourself into the tower and lock up behind you, all completely unsupervised!! Hugo and Drouet purportedly carved their initials somewhere in the tower, but the museum staff say this is a myth); the 1914 statue of Hugo in Candie Gardens (big, impressive, mossy), alongside gardens featuring plants inspired by his work; and the new (2021 I think?) statue of Hugo on the seafront in St Peter Port (you can sit next to him and be terrorised by the octopus behind him). I also made it to Fermain Bay, another of Hugo's haunts and a really, really beautiful place, for my firsts decidedly nippy ocean swim of the year.

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Oh, also from my Guernsey trip!! This fantastic little book:

Featuring fantastic little caricatures such as:

This one is my absolute favourite:

I got to visit Hauteville House in Guernsey recently! Here are a few pics (taken on my very old shitty phone), my experience of the house and its garden, and some my favourite info from the tour.

First of all, HH is MASSIVE - five floors, and though each room really left a lasting impression on me, I could not describe the layout of the house or even specify which room is on which floor if my life depended on it. It's just so big!! Hugo lived there for most of his time in exile in Guernsey (after being expelled from France, Belgium, and Jersey in quick succession), along with his surviving family members at times. The house has stayed in the family from when Hugo lived in it, so it's been kept as it was when he lived there. In the Information Centre in Guernsey, there are old black and white photos alongside newer colour photos of different rooms and they're virtually identical. Recent restoration works are now finished; I was all booked to visit Guernsey in mid-2020 upon the house's reopening while still working on my Les Mis PhD, but obviously travel Did Not Happen. From the front, the building is flat and fairly unobtrusive, which is DECEPTIVE. I was familiar with the madness I was about to encounter inside (in part from Jean Baptiste Hugo's - Hugo's great, great grandson's - recently published book of frankly stunning new photographs of the house) and it still blew me away.

You have to book a guided tour in order to visit because the house is preserved exactly as Hugo decorated it, so literally everything is An Item (no touching anything except the banisters). Tours are £12 pp for the hour as of May 2024 (free disabled & carers' tickets available, as well as other concessions) and I believe there are about 10 places available on each tour. The guides are incredibly knowledgeable, and tours are available in French or English. You reserve a place in advance, pay when you get there, and leave bags in lockers in the little reception area/gift shop (a few books and a nice selection of very neat postcards; none of the snowglobes with Hugo's face in them that you get in the Maison de Hugo in Paris). I could have listened to our guide talk for about three more hours, easy - if I'd had more time in Guernsey, I'd have booked another tour. Anyone can visit the garden for free during opening hours too; I started looking up Guernsey property prices because imagine just being able to hang out in Hugo's garden any time you like???

HH was the only place Hugo ever owned - he rented rooms/apartments otherwise - specifically so he couldn't be exiled from Guernsey. He thought he would die there. He stayed even after being pardoned. He decorated the entire place over the course of three years. His family's rooms are now the staff's private offices, as Hugo didn't uh... enforce his tastes there. His family wasn't allowed in some of his rooms upstairs. Also on Hauteville is a smaller building down the road, now a private residence, where Hugo lived when he first arrived in Guernsey.

I've visited his Place des Vosges house in Paris before and, in hindsight, it's wild how much of a museum it feels like, with it's big open rooms and display cases and exhibits, in comparison to HH. HH really feels like Hugo's in a far more profound way, which I should have anticipated but really wasn't expecting. I can't stand the man, I've spent nearly 10 years writing about him, which is nine years too many, I'm not a particularly emotional or tearful person, but I felt really quite moved at times, spending time in this space.

The first room you're taken into during the tour is on the ground floor and is relatively tasteful tbh - dark red painted walls, portraits of Hugo and his family around the room, with a focus on Léopoldine, and including Hugo's artwork from some of his travels and a collage by his son Charles. Massive billiards table in the middle of the room, and a sweet grandfather clock.

Also downstairs is a dining room, which showcases the way Hugo repurposed unexpected objects to create A Vision; the table is made from a door, wooden panelling on the walls is made from a dismantled chest of drawers and chair legs, the sofa is Turkish rugs. There's carpet on the ceiling. There are a lot of convex mirrors. One wall with a mirror hanging on it is actually a secret door that opens up to reveal a darkroom Charles used to develop his photographs. There's also a long hallway with the walls and ceilings absolute covered in porcelain plates.

One room features a wooden carving over the door - EXILIUM VITA EST - exile is life (would make a sick tattoo). There's also a great wooden throne with a chain across the arms. The chain isn't there to stop visitors from sitting in the chair. Hugo put the chain there. The chair itself is carved with, e.g., his father's name and, if I'm remembering rightly, an old king's name. It symbolises how not only do the dead Hugos not join the living Hugos at the dining table, nor does empire nor monarchy have a place at the dining table. He really believes in subtlety in his home decor, evidently.

The whole house is a movement from darkness to light; the downstairs rooms and staircases are very dark, almost oppressively so, with dark woods and colours and very little natural light. As you move up through the house, the colours gradually become lighter and there are more and more windows everywhere, until you reach the glass room on the top floor of the house, where Hugo wrote looking out over St Peter Port - where he finished writing Les Mis. On clear days, you can see France. Our guide talked a lot about how Hugo believed it was necessary to have one in order to appreciate the other - the sublime and the grotesque working together, etc. His library, featuring a selection of books (e.g., encyclopaedias, the Bible, his own works, some Dickens - in French of course) from his 1,100-tome collection, is in a particularly dark hallway that you have to pass through (knowledge) in order to reach the lighter rooms (illumination). Literally every detail in the house is symbolic like this.

Among the upstairs rooms, there's the red room and the blue room (pictured). These feature a lot of chinoiserie (some details pictured), which Hugo and his contemporaries were into, though he never travelled to Asia. The blue room is one of the calmest in the house, and where you really start to see the movement toward the light. There's a conservatory on these lower upstairs floors too, with a beautiful view of Castle Cornet, one of Hugo's evening walks, and Havelet Bay, where he'd often swim. Nowadays, they dress up fire a cannon every day at noon from the castle, which is very fun.

Hugo's "bedroom" is also upstairs. He expected to die in Guernsey and staged his deathbed with a tiny white skull on top. There's a wooden figure of the Virgin Mary, which he whittled himself, on top of one of the ceiling lights. The other half of the room features church pews and a table and chairs laid out as a courtroom - his judgement. The drama.

I say "bedroom" because Hugo actually slept in a tiny yellow room off the glass room, on a red sofa-like bed that's so close to the ground it's virtually on the floor. The room is so minimalist that there are panels built into the walls so none of his clothes or other belongings were visible. One of the wooden wall panels features a scene of a man presenting the head of a dragon - who bears a remarkable resemblance to Napoleon - to a princess. Hugo painted these himself. On the wall between the glass room and his actual bedroom is perhaps his most famous piece of art; a hanged man, whose Hugo's protests against the death penalty couldn't save.

Another detail to note is that the man put his initials EVERYWHERE. If I had stopped to count every single instance of VH around the house, I would still be there. This ranges from tiny gold-painted carvings into wooden parts of the walls to a gigantic H made out of delftware tiles taking up a centre third of an entire room's wall to great green trellises in the conservatory spelling out VH in different reconfigurations (VH next to each other, V overlaying H, etc.).

The garden at HH is beautiful. It's long with lots of leafy bushes and trees, and loads of flowers blooming (even a few lilacs hanging on right at the end of May!), and herbs and vegetables at the end. There's a gigantic oak tree Hugo planted in hope of a United States of Europe. The house also looks completely different from the back (pictured) to its plain face at the front; it's the back that really feels like HH.

My overall impression of HH is the sheer scale of the intricate details everywhere (and how much our guide knew about absolutely everything in every single room); everything in the house is So Much on both large and small scales. It's mad to me that he decorated the entire house in just three years - it's taken me nearly half a year to deal with a mould problem in and repaint my tiny bedroom. I could've spent a year just looking at all the stuff everywhere.

Guernsey is tiny and Hugo was all over it, but some other things of interest are Victoria Tower where he and Juliette Drouet used to meet (you ask for the key at the museum in Candie Gardens and they just let you go off with it and let yourself into the tower and lock up behind you, all completely unsupervised!! Hugo and Drouet purportedly carved their initials somewhere in the tower, but the museum staff say this is a myth); the 1914 statue of Hugo in Candie Gardens (big, impressive, mossy), alongside gardens featuring plants inspired by his work; and the new (2021 I think?) statue of Hugo on the seafront in St Peter Port (you can sit next to him and be terrorised by the octopus behind him). I also made it to Fermain Bay, another of Hugo's haunts and a really, really beautiful place, for my firsts decidedly nippy ocean swim of the year.

[byjuxtaposition]

I got to visit Hauteville House in Guernsey recently! Here are a few pics (taken on my very old shitty phone), my experience of the house and its garden, and some my favourite info from the tour.

First of all, HH is MASSIVE - five floors, and though each room really left a lasting impression on me, I could not describe the layout of the house or even specify which room is on which floor if my life depended on it. It's just so big!! Hugo lived there for most of his time in exile in Guernsey (after being expelled from France, Belgium, and Jersey in quick succession), along with his surviving family members at times. The house has stayed in the family from when Hugo lived in it, so it's been kept as it was when he lived there. In the Information Centre in Guernsey, there are old black and white photos alongside newer colour photos of different rooms and they're virtually identical. Recent restoration works are now finished; I was all booked to visit Guernsey in mid-2020 upon the house's reopening while still working on my Les Mis PhD, but obviously travel Did Not Happen. From the front, the building is flat and fairly unobtrusive, which is DECEPTIVE. I was familiar with the madness I was about to encounter inside (in part from Jean Baptiste Hugo's - Hugo's great, great grandson's - recently published book of frankly stunning new photographs of the house) and it still blew me away.

You have to book a guided tour in order to visit because the house is preserved exactly as Hugo decorated it, so literally everything is An Item (no touching anything except the banisters). Tours are £12 pp for the hour as of May 2024 (free disabled & carers' tickets available, as well as other concessions) and I believe there are about 10 places available on each tour. The guides are incredibly knowledgeable, and tours are available in French or English. You reserve a place in advance, pay when you get there, and leave bags in lockers in the little reception area/gift shop (a few books and a nice selection of very neat postcards; none of the snowglobes with Hugo's face in them that you get in the Maison de Hugo in Paris). I could have listened to our guide talk for about three more hours, easy - if I'd had more time in Guernsey, I'd have booked another tour. Anyone can visit the garden for free during opening hours too; I started looking up Guernsey property prices because imagine just being able to hang out in Hugo's garden any time you like???

HH was the only place Hugo ever owned - he rented rooms/apartments otherwise - specifically so he couldn't be exiled from Guernsey. He thought he would die there. He stayed even after being pardoned. He decorated the entire place over the course of three years. His family's rooms are now the staff's private offices, as Hugo didn't uh... enforce his tastes there. His family wasn't allowed in some of his rooms upstairs. Also on Hauteville is a smaller building down the road, now a private residence, where Hugo lived when he first arrived in Guernsey.

I've visited his Place des Vosges house in Paris before and, in hindsight, it's wild how much of a museum it feels like, with its big open rooms and display cases and exhibits, in comparison to HH. HH really feels like Hugo's in a far more profound way, which I should have anticipated but really wasn't expecting. I can't stand the man, I've spent nearly 10 years writing about him, which is nine years too many, I'm not a particularly emotional or tearful person, but I felt really quite moved at times, spending time in this space.

The first room you're taken into during the tour is on the ground floor and is relatively tasteful tbh - dark red painted walls, portraits of Hugo and his family around the room, with a focus on Léopoldine, and including Hugo's artwork from some of his travels and a collage by his son Charles. Massive billiards table in the middle of the room, and a sweet grandfather clock.

Also downstairs is a dining room, which showcases the way Hugo repurposed unexpected objects to create A Vision; the table is made from a door, wooden panelling on the walls is made from a dismantled chest of drawers and chair legs, the sofa is Turkish rugs. There's carpet on the ceiling. There are a lot of convex mirrors. One wall with a mirror hanging on it is actually a secret door that opens up to reveal a darkroom Charles used to develop his photographs. There's also a long hallway with the walls and ceilings absolutely covered in porcelain plates.

One room features a wooden carving over the door - EXILIUM VITA EST - exile is life (would make a sick tattoo). There's also a great wooden throne with a chain across the arms. The chain isn't there to stop visitors from sitting in the chair. Hugo put the chain there. The chair itself is carved with, e.g., his father's name and, if I'm remembering rightly, an old king's name. It symbolises how not only do the dead Hugos not join the living Hugos at the dining table, nor does empire nor monarchy have a place at the dining table. He really believes in subtlety in his home decor, evidently.

The whole house is a movement from darkness to light; the downstairs rooms and staircases are very dark, almost oppressively so, with dark woods and colours and very little natural light. As you move up through the house, the colours gradually become lighter and there are more and more windows everywhere, until you reach the glass room on the top floor of the house, where Hugo wrote looking out over St Peter Port - where he finished writing Les Mis. On clear days, you can see France. Our guide talked a lot about how Hugo believed it was necessary to have one in order to appreciate the other - the sublime and the grotesque working together, etc. His library, featuring a selection of books (e.g., encyclopaedias, the Bible, his own works, some Dickens - in French of course) from his 1,100-tome collection, is in a particularly dark hallway that you have to pass through (knowledge) in order to reach the lighter rooms (illumination). Literally every detail in the house is symbolic like this.

Among the upstairs rooms, there's the red room and the blue room (pictured). These feature a lot of chinoiserie (some details pictured), which Hugo and his contemporaries were into, though he never travelled to Asia. The blue room is one of the calmest in the house, and where you really start to see the movement toward the light. There's a conservatory on these lower upstairs floors too, with a beautiful view of Castle Cornet, one of Hugo's evening walks, and Havelet Bay, where he'd often swim. Nowadays, they dress up and fire a cannon every day at noon from the castle, which is very fun.

Hugo's "bedroom" is also upstairs. He expected to die in Guernsey and staged his deathbed with a tiny white skull on top. There's a wooden figure of the Virgin Mary, which he whittled himself, on top of one of the ceiling lights. The other half of the room features church pews and a table and chairs laid out as a courtroom - his judgement. The drama.

I say "bedroom" because Hugo actually slept in a tiny yellow room off the glass room, on a red sofa-like bed that's so close to the ground it's virtually on the floor. The room is so minimalist that there are panels built into the walls so none of his clothes or other belongings were visible. One of the wooden wall panels features a scene of a man presenting the head of a dragon - who bears a remarkable resemblance to Napoleon - to a princess. Hugo painted these himself. On the wall between the glass room and his actual bedroom is perhaps his most famous piece of art; a hanged man, whose Hugo's protests against the death penalty couldn't save.

Another detail to note is that the man put his initials EVERYWHERE. If I had stopped to count every single instance of VH around the house, I would still be there. This ranges from tiny gold-painted carvings into wooden parts of the walls to a gigantic H made out of delftware tiles taking up a centre third of an entire room's wall to great green trellises in the conservatory spelling out VH in different reconfigurations (VH next to each other, V overlaying H, etc.).

The garden at HH is beautiful. It's long with lots of leafy bushes and trees, and loads of flowers blooming (even a few lilacs hanging on right at the end of May!), and herbs and vegetables at the end. There's a gigantic oak tree Hugo planted in hope of a United States of Europe. The house also looks completely different from the back (pictured) to its plain face at the front; it's the back that really feels like HH.

My overall impression of HH is the sheer scale of the intricate details everywhere (and how much our guide knew about absolutely everything in every single room); everything in the house is So Much on both large and small scales. It's mad to me that he decorated the entire house in just three years - it's taken me nearly half a year to deal with a mould problem in and repaint my tiny bedroom. I could've spent a year just looking at all the stuff everywhere.

Guernsey is tiny and Hugo was all over it, but some other things of interest are Victoria Tower where he and Juliette Drouet used to meet (you ask for the key at the museum in Candie Gardens and they just let you go off with it and let yourself into the tower and lock up behind you, all completely unsupervised!! Hugo and Drouet purportedly carved their initials somewhere in the tower, but the museum staff say this is a myth); the 1914 statue of Hugo in Candie Gardens (big, impressive, mossy), alongside gardens featuring plants inspired by his work; and the new (2021 I think?) statue of Hugo on the seafront in St Peter Port (you can sit next to him and be terrorised by the octopus behind him). I also made it to Fermain Bay, another of Hugo's haunts and a really, really beautiful place, for my first decidedly nippy ocean swim of the year.

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WE NEED AS MUCH FURNITURE AS YOU CAN THROW DOWN!

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grantaire with long hair and long coat is something that can be so personal

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The Real Les Mis Captions

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Reblog if its ok to spam you with boops

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cheers to the man who sleeps during the end of the world

Grantaire sketch.

Micron 0.2. Derwent HB and 9B

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Silly hat day yesterday!!!

Incredibly excited to share that my PhD thesis - Same-Sex Desire and Intimacy in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Its Adaptations: A Creative and Critical Study - is now available online and should be accessible without an academic login!!

I have been working on various iterations of this project for almost a decade now and I am so proud that this is what it has culminated in (so far - further schemes in the works, always).

Most of all, I'm beyond grateful to the fandom for all of the input and encouragement and resources and enthusiasm I've received over the years - this thesis literally would not (could not!) exist without you and I'm chuffed to bits to finally be able to give something back. I hope it still means as much to you guys as it has to me all this time.

Enjoy!!!

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Happy 200th anniversary of Jean Valjean adopting Cosette! <3

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Thank you so much for all the lovely comments in the notes over the past couple of days!! I'm :')

I realised I should have included the abstract with the original post:

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables has a profound relationship with its queer fans. Fans testify to the novel’s importance in their lives and, through substantial self-reflexive creative and critical online fanwork, shape the novel’s existence today by exploring homoerotic possibilities between characters Valjean and Javert, and Enjolras and Grantaire. However, the novel and its adaptations have not been studied from a queer perspective, and the remarkable and enduring phenomenon that is the Les Misérables fandom has not been researched at all to date. Addressing these gaps, this thesis uses a critical approach that develops the concept of a ‘queer sensibility’ and Hugo’s notion of the ‘lecteur pensif’; it argues the novel depicts desire and intimacy in ways that both conform to and extend how same-sex desire and intimacy were depicted—overtly and though coding—in established queer literature of the period. The thesis demonstrates how, in professional adaptations of Les Misérables, desire and intimacy appear but are also negated in relation to Valjean, Javert, Enjolras, and Grantaire, due to the muting of the revolutionary politics of the source novel. Contextualised by documented fandoms and informed by the author’s immersion in fandom for over a decade, this thesis further uses a qualitative survey to show how queer fans’ work with Les Misérables enables them to negotiate their identities, politics, and experiences. The critical part of the thesis is followed by an experimental creative writing section blending fanfiction with academic research. This creative work further draws out the transfiguring potential of queer love in Les Misérables by reimagining Enjolras and Grantaire’s relationship as an openly queer romance in present-day Paris. This thesis as a whole thereby opens up how we read nineteenth-century French literature and contributes to our understanding of contemporary queer connections to same-sex desire and intimacy in historical source texts.

And for those who just know me for the interview I conducted with George Blagden about Enjolras and Grantaire back in 2015, I should note that it features in my thesis, with accompanying analysis! I also conducted interviews with Andrew Davies, Turlough Convery, and Ciaran Bowling over the course of my PhD - all can be found in full in the appendices as well.

Incredibly excited to share that my PhD thesis - Same-Sex Desire and Intimacy in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Its Adaptations: A Creative and Critical Study - is now available online and should be accessible without an academic login!!

I have been working on various iterations of this project for almost a decade now and I am so proud that this is what it has culminated in (so far - further schemes in the works, always).

Most of all, I'm beyond grateful to the fandom for all of the input and encouragement and resources and enthusiasm I've received over the years - this thesis literally would not (could not!) exist without you and I'm chuffed to bits to finally be able to give something back. I hope it still means as much to you guys as it has to me all this time.

Enjoy!!!