Recommendations
Books Like Don Juan
Best books to read after Don Juan by Lord Byron
Readers who love Don Juan — Byron's brilliant satirical epic in ottava rima, with its comic narrator, its assault on English hypocrisy, and its idyllic love story between Juan and Haidée — will enjoy these works of satirical verse, comic epic, and the great Romantic tradition of the poem that refuses to be solemn.
- 1Buy
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
by Lord Byron
Byron's earlier long poem and the counter-statement that Don Juan was reacting against — reading Childe Harold (the melancholy Romantic wanderer, apparently autobiographical) alongside Don Juan (the comic satirist who mocks that very pose) shows Byron's full range.
- 2Buy
Orlando Furioso
by Ludovico Ariosto
Ariosto's Italian comic epic gave Byron his verse form (ottava rima) and his method (digression, comedy, romance, satire alternating freely) — reading even a few cantos of Ariosto shows where Don Juan's formal innovation came from and how Byron transformed it.
- 3Buy
The Rape of the Lock
by Alexander Pope
The English mock-heroic poem that Don Juan descends from — Pope's application of epic grandeur to a social triviality is the nearest predecessor to Byron's application of epic machinery to Juan's adventures; both poems are comic attacks on the same English social pretension.
- 4Buy
Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Swift's satirical prose masterpiece runs parallel to Don Juan in its comic intelligence and savage social attack — where Byron deploys his satirical energy in verse, Swift deploys his in fictional travel narrative; both are the great Augustan-Romantic tradition of the comic assault on hypocrisy.
- 5Buy
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's novel is the prose heir to Don Juan's satirical social comedy — Becky Sharp's brilliant manoeuvring in the social world is the Victorian novel's equivalent of Juan's passive movement through European society; Thackeray explicitly modelled his narrator's comic tone on Byron.
- 6Buy
Pushkin: Selected Verse
by Alexander Pushkin
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1833) is the Russian Don Juan — the same ottava rima (adapted to Russian), the same satirical narrator, the same social world viewed with comic detachment; Byron was Pushkin's primary model and Onegin is his finest response.
- 7Buy
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's epic of passion, justice, and redemption is the French equivalent of Don Juan's social scope and ambition — where Byron satirizes from above, Hugo sympathizes from below; the two together define the range of the Romantic long poem's ambition.
- 8Buy
The Prelude
by William Wordsworth
The anti-Don Juan — Wordsworth's autobiographical meditation on the growth of the poetic mind is exactly the 'egotistical sublime' that Byron's narrator mocks; reading both shows the full range of Romantic poetic ambition and the depth of the Byron-Wordsworth disagreement.
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