"Victor Hugo's writings and the plastic arts have often been discussed, but rarely has their relation been specified. In The Simplest of Signs, Raser uses semiotic analysis to isolate features of Hugo's discourse (his use of dates, facts, performatives, etc.) to show, on the one hand, how Hugo used these to participate in the greater Romantic project of creating effects of immediacy and presence, and, on the other, how he presupposed a concept of the plastic image take likens it more to perception than to reading." "Raser's approach is of necessity interdisciplinary: to show how Hugo defines the genre of art criticism, he must take into account the influences, recurrent themes, and references that are used by literary historians. Since, however, the texts discussed frequently refer to drawings, engravings, or paintings, the formal analyses of art history also come into play. Further, since the works described are invariably discussed in terms of their "beauty," aesthetics and beyond it, the twentieth-century critique of nineteenth-century aesthetics, are used."--BOOK JACKET.