![Cover: To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola Cover: To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola](https://udpress.udel.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/tokillatext-168x300.jpg)
To Kill a Text analyzes the intertextual conflicts between four monuments of nineteenth-century fiction: Notre-Dame de Paris, Bleak House, Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal. The fundamental hypothesis of the book is that Dickens and Zola exemplify Hugo’s conception of the novel as a “graft” of one work upon another, producing hybrid mixtures of genres and styles of representation.