342 Book Reviews Aristotle's Organon. Calegories and Elhics; from Porphyry's lsagoge, Vossius's Rhetoric, Daniel Stahl's Axiomala philosophica; and Johannes Magirus's Physiologia Peripatetica.- The omission of these sections of the manuscript (also called The TriniO' Notebook) is not an insignificant weakness of the volume. For example, the topics discussed in the Questiones follow in approximate order roughly the same sequence of topics in Magirus" and other contemporary Peripatetic manuals, a fact that seems to have escaped the editors, and with it, ajortiori, its significance. They do discuss briefly the intluence of Peripatetic ideas in Newton's mature thought (pp. 15-20), but a more serious analysis would have been welcome, together with the texts on which it would have been based. Tbe Quesliones presented out of their context are not quite the Quesliones entered by Newton into his Trinity Notebook. Begast Alan Gabbey Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel, Victor Brombert (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), + xii, $8.95 P.B. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Victor Hugo was one of the principal targets of the critical reaction that set in the wake of the "romantic agony'. The re- valuation, or devaluation, of Hugo's signilicance, well illustrated by Andr6 Gide's celebrated remark 'Victor Hugo, alas', took, however, an opposite turn in recent decades as the scope of modern criticism broadened through the absorption of a variety of psychological, linguistic and semiological elements. Viewed through the prism of modern criticism Hugo now seems to re-occupy his rightful place among the giants (Goethe, Byron, Flaubert, Dostoievski, Tolstoi, to mention only a few}, who dominated the literary landscape between the Napoleonic era and the fin de siecle. Before setting out to write the book under review, Professor Brombert had published several essays that contributed greatly to the re-evaluation of Hugo's oeuvre. Re- evaluation is, however, merely the by-product of a more ambitious project designed to explore the nature, structure and significance of what the author calls 'the visionary novel'. Generally speaking all literary or artistic creation could be described as 'visionary' sincc they all retlect, or express, the specificity of their creator's vision underlying aesthetic orientations or ideological commitments. But, as Brombert convincingly demonstrates, in Hugo's novels the unifying impact of the individual vision manifests itself with exceptional authenticity thus providing the ideal matrix in which the characteristics of the visionary novel can be defined. The difficulties are noted by Brombert himself. While stressing the moral and spiritual content of Hugo's vision he also points to the turbulence that characterises it. There is, for instance, in Hugo's novels an interplay of visionary and ideological elements which, in Brombert's words, 'create surprising links between the world of fantasy and moral concerns'. It is on that interplay of imagination and moral commitment, and on the tensions it generates, that Brombert focuses his attention as he dcciphers the often hermetic allusions and metaphors which give such an idiosyncratic flavour to Hugo's writings. According to Brombcrt, from Hugo's first novel (llan d'L~land, "a parody of the Gothic novel') to the last (Qualrevingt-Treize centred on the fateful riddle of violence in history), each novel reflects the author's preoccupation with problems rooted in the individual's personality as well as in social and political realities. Hugo's approaches to highly complex subjects such as freedom, revolution, law and what Brombert calls "a personal