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Books Like Les Aventures de Télémaque by François de Fénelon
Works that use the journey to imagine a better world
Fénelon sends Telemachus through the Mediterranean in order to show him every possible form of bad government — luxury, tyranny, avarice, military aggression — so that when he returns to Ithaca he will know what not to do. These works use the journey in the same way: the voyage is not escape but education, and every stop reveals a political or moral truth.
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Buy on AmazonL'Odyssée
by Homère
The model — Fénelon's Télémaque is a direct continuation of Homer's Odyssey; Telemachus's voyage searching for Odysseus picks up where Homer's first four books (the Telemachy) leave off; reading the Odyssey first is essential
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Buy on AmazonL'Utopie
by Thomas More
The utopian predecessor — More's Utopia (1516) is the genre Fénelon is working in: the traveler who visits an ideal society that implicitly criticizes his own; the island of Salente is the Télémaque equivalent of Utopia
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Buy on AmazonLes Aventures de Gordon Pym
by Edgar Allan Poe
The dark descendant — where Fénelon's voyage is educational and the goal is political wisdom, Poe's voyage is into horror and the void; the voyage novel that inherits the Fénelon frame and inverts its teleology
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Buy on AmazonGulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
The contemporary satire — Swift's Gulliver is the exact English parallel to Fénelon's Télémaque: a voyage through allegorical kingdoms that satirize contemporary politics; Lilliput and Brobdingnag are the Salente of English political satire
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Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
The ironic descendant — Voltaire's Candide inherits the Fénelon format (a young man educated by travel through a world of moral examples) and inverts it: the world is not a series of good and bad governments but a series of catastrophes; the Enlightenment critique of Fénelonian optimism
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Buy on AmazonÉmile ou De l'éducation
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The educational sequel — Rousseau's Émile (1762) develops the educational program that Fénelon begins in Télémaque into the full philosophy of natural education; Rousseau is explicit about his debt to Fénelon
- 7Buy on Amazon
Le Mentor ou les princes éclairés
by Baculard d'Arnaud
The direct 18th-century continuation — the Télémaque formula adapted for the literature of enlightened monarchy that dominated European political fiction in the 18th century; the direct line from Fénelon to the literature of the philosophes
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Buy on AmazonDiscours sur l'histoire universelle
by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
The counter-text — Bossuet's providential history is the political theology Fénelon is implicitly arguing against; reading Bossuet and Fénelon together gives the full picture of the political debate in the court of Louis XIV
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