ursued themes of hope and liberty. While HugoÆs literary works avoided the despair found in de VignyÆs work, Hugo nevertheless allowed some disappointment to emerge because of the restoration of the Second Empire in France. In HugoÆs later literary works, he appeared to foresee the era of Realism in his emotional characterizations of the plight of the common people in French society (Hugo, 1973). HugoÆs willingness to mix literary genres in his writing (comedy and tragedy, as an example) strengthened his ability to cross the span between Romanticism and Realism.
Realism was a movement that shifted human focus away from the fuzzy unreality of Romanticism to the observable reality of everyday life. Verisimilitude was prized in literature. Where the literature of Romanticism tended to focus
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