Recommendations
Books Like Arcadia
Best books to read after Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Readers who love Arcadia by Tom Stoppard are drawn to its combination of intellectual brilliance, emotional depth, the integration of science and literary history into theatrical form, and the devastating final scene in which both time periods share the stage — they want plays and novels that deal with chaos theory and entropy, the relationship between past and present, and the tradition of the British intellectual comedy.
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
The companion that made Stoppard's reputation — Ros and Guil inside the plot of Hamlet. Companion Stoppard plays about determinism and free will: Ros and Guil cannot escape the plot of Hamlet; the characters of Arcadia cannot escape the second law of thermodynamics
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The Real Thing
by Tom Stoppard
The companion in Stoppard's more emotionally direct mode — Henry, a playwright, and his complicated romantic life. Companion Stoppard plays organized around the relationship between the intellectual and the emotional: both are love stories concealed in philosophical investigations
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Copenhagen
by Michael Frayn
Frayn's companion integrating scientific thinking (quantum mechanics) into theatrical form. Copenhagen and Arcadia are the two British plays of the 1990s that most successfully integrated scientific thinking into theatrical form: Stoppard's with chaos theory; Frayn's with quantum mechanics
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion investigation of the relationship between intellectual ambition and the life of the emotions — Dorothea Brooke's aspirations. Arcadia's investigation of the relationship between intellectual ambition (Thomasina's mathematics, Hannah's scholarship) and the life of the emotions is Stoppard's version of the question that organizes Middlemarch
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The French Lieutenant's Woman
by John Fowles
Fowles's companion about the relationship between the Victorian past and the present, and what is lost in the gap between them. Both are organized around the simultaneous existence of two time periods and the impossibility of the present fully understanding the past
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Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
Mitchell's companion about the relationship between different time periods and the patterns that recur across them. Companion investigations of whether the patterns that recur in history repeat themselves or simply rhyme
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The Invention of Love
by Tom Stoppard
The later companion Stoppard play — the old and young A.E. Housman meeting at the Styx. Companion Stoppard plays about the relationship between the intellectual life and the emotional life, and what remains when the life you have refused comes back to confront the life you have lived
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Possession
by A.S. Byatt
Byatt's companion investigation of literary scholars researching the lives of Victorian poets — the past and present in simultaneous investigation. Possession and Arcadia are companion investigations of the relationship between literary scholarship and the human passions it investigates: both are organized around scholars who discover that the lives they are studying are more alive than the lives they are living
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