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Books Like Atala
Best books to read after Atala by François-René de Chateaubriand
Readers captivated by Atala's exotic American landscape, its tragic love story, and Chateaubriand's revolutionary prose will find René as its companion and the tradition of French and European Romantic literature about the encounter with the natural world.
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René
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The direct companion — Chateaubriand wrote Atala and René as a pair, and in narrative terms they are connected: Chactas, who tells Atala's story, becomes René's adoptive Natchez grandfather in René; the two texts should be read together, with Atala first, as two versions of the same Romantic argument about the impossibility of authentic happiness in either nature (Atala) or civilization (René).
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Paul et Virginie
by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
The direct predecessor — Saint-Pierre's 1788 novel about two children raised in nature on Mauritius established the exotic tropical prose that Chateaubriand inherits in Atala; both are stories of innocent love in a natural paradise destroyed by civilization's demands, and both use the natural landscape as an emotional and philosophical agent rather than mere background.
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The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper
The American companion in the tradition of fiction about the vanishing Native American world — Cooper's 1826 novel about the French and Indian War uses the American wilderness and its Native American inhabitants in ways that parallel Chateaubriand's; but where Chateaubriand's Native Americans are primarily a Romantic landscape through which French Romantic passion plays out, Cooper's Mohicans are historical figures in a specific colonial conflict.
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Génie du christianisme
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The work that originally contained Atala and gave it its context — Chateaubriand's 1802 apologetic work arguing for the beauty and truth of Christianity (against Enlightenment rationalism) is the theological frame within which Atala's story of a Christian vow, its consequences, and its consolation makes its full argument; Atala can be read as a self-contained narrative, but its Christian melancholy only makes sense within the framework of the Génie du christianisme's argument.
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The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The American companion in the tradition of the novel about guilt, vow, and the conflict between passion and religious obligation — Hawthorne's 1850 novel about Hester Prynne's adultery and its consequences is the Puritan-American version of the Catholic vow-keeping that destroys Atala; both novels use an American setting and a religious obligation to make the same argument about what authentic feeling requires against what religion demands.
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Manon Lescaut
by Abbé Prévost
The eighteenth-century French companion in the tradition of the fatal love that cannot survive its circumstances — Prévost's story of des Grieux's destruction by Manon is the French pre-Romantic precursor to the Atala-Chactas tragedy; both are stories of a man destroyed by his love for a beautiful woman who cannot (for different reasons) be domesticated into a stable relationship.
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Oberman
by Étienne de Sénancour
The French companion in the tradition of the Romantic prose meditation on nature and despair — Sénancour's 1804 novel about a wanderer in the Swiss Alps represents the European (rather than exotic American) version of the same Romantic emotional world; where Chateaubriand's landscape is vast, tropical, and sublime, Sénancour's is austere, Alpine, and bleakly precise; together they define the range of French Romantic landscape as emotional medium.
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The Jungle Book
by Rudyard Kipling
The modern companion in the tradition of the story of the human child raised in nature — Kipling's 1894 stories about Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, is the popular late nineteenth-century version of the premise that Paul et Virginie and Atala share; where Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand are interested in the philosophical and emotional argument about nature vs. civilization, Kipling is interested in the adventure and the specific ecology of the Indian jungle.
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