Recommendations
Books Like De l'Allemagne
Best books to read after De l'Allemagne by Germaine de Staël
Readers who respond to De l'Allemagne's founding of French Romanticism, its introduction of German thought to France, and de Staël's argument about the classical versus Romantic opposition will find the wider tradition of Romantic literary criticism.
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Delphine
by Germaine de Staël
De Staël's first major novel, published the same year as the theoretical argument in De l'Allemagne was being formed: reading Delphine alongside De l'Allemagne shows how the same intellectual concerns animate both the novel and the critical work.
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Preface to Cromwell
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's 1827 manifesto for French Romanticism is the most important critical document that De l'Allemagne made possible: Hugo's argument for the grotesque alongside the sublime, for Shakespeare against Racine, and for historical drama against classical tragedy descends directly from de Staël's framework.
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Racine and Shakespeare
by Stendhal
Stendhal's pamphlets (1823–25) applied de Staël's classical versus Romantic framework to the specific debate about French theater: where de Staël introduced the argument theoretically, Stendhal deployed it polemically in the context of the contemporary French stage.
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Corinne, or Italy
by Germaine de Staël
Corinne performs in fiction what De l'Allemagne argues in criticism: the novel shows a woman of the kind of genius that the Northern Romantic tradition values being destroyed by a man formed by the Southern classical tradition, making Italy the battleground for the same cultural conflict.
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The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
De Staël's analysis of Goethe in De l'Allemagne was the introduction of Goethe to most French readers: Werther was already known in France, but De l'Allemagne provided the critical framework for understanding Goethe as the defining figure of German Romanticism.
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Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character
by Germaine de Staël
The collection of de Staël's earlier critical and political essays shows the development of the arguments that culminate in De l'Allemagne: her essays on literature and its relation to social institutions (1800) are the direct precursors of the later work.
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Ten Years of Exile
by Germaine de Staël
The memoir of de Staël's exile under Napoleon provides the biographical context for understanding why De l'Allemagne was suppressed: the political conflict between de Staël and Napoleon that produced her exile was also the context in which she wrote her cultural analysis of Germany as an alternative to Napoleonic France.
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Lectures on the History of Literature
by Friedrich Schlegel
Schlegel's lectures (1815) are the German Romantic counterpart to De l'Allemagne: where de Staël introduced German Romantic thought to France, Schlegel developed the German systematic theory of Romanticism that de Staël was drawing on — reading both works together shows the full intellectual exchange.
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