Recommendations
Books Like Les Natchez
Best books to read after Les Natchez by Chateaubriand
Readers who respond to Les Natchez's account of the destruction of the Natchez people, its epic prose treatment of colonial violence, and its relationship to Atala and René will find the wider tradition of French Romantic prose epic and colonial literature.
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Buy on AmazonAtala
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The most famous episode extracted from Les Natchez: Atala tells the story of Chactas before the massacre and is essential for understanding Les Natchez as the larger work from which both Atala and René are drawn.
- 2Buy on Amazon
René
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The second episode extracted from Les Natchez: René is the French protagonist whose story within the Natchez community provides the European perspective on the American world, and reading René after Les Natchez reveals the fuller context of the character's appearance.
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Buy on AmazonThe Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper
Cooper's novel, which Chateaubriand admired, treats the destruction of Native American civilization by colonial expansion in the English colonial world: Les Natchez and The Last of the Mohicans are the French and English Romantic novels about the same historical process.
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Buy on AmazonPaul and Virginia
by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's 1788 novel, which Chateaubriand acknowledged as a direct influence, treats the destruction of a natural paradise by European society with the same elegiac tone that characterizes Les Natchez: both novels mourn the loss of an innocent world that European civilization destroys.
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Buy on AmazonBug-Jargal
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's early novel about the Haitian Revolution treats colonial violence and slave revolt with Romantic sympathy in ways that parallel Chateaubriand's treatment of the Natchez massacre: both are French Romantic novels that use colonial history as the occasion for a meditation on civilization and its destruction of other worlds.
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Buy on AmazonMémoires d'outre-tombe
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The Mémoires contain Chateaubriand's account of his actual American journey (1791) which provided the research behind both Atala and Les Natchez: reading the autobiographical account of his American experience alongside the fictional treatment in Les Natchez illuminates how Chateaubriand transformed lived experience into Romantic literary material.
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Buy on AmazonCinq-Mars
by Alfred de Vigny
Vigny's 1826 historical novel was published the same year as the complete Les Natchez and shares its interest in using historical material for Romantic literary purposes: where Chateaubriand uses the Natchez massacre, Vigny uses the conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu, but both are treating historical defeat as the occasion for Romantic elegy.
- 8Buy on Amazon
The Natchez (historical essays)
by Edouard Glissant
Glissant's twentieth-century Caribbean-French writing returns to the same Natchez material with a postcolonial perspective that inverts Chateaubriand's Romantic primitivism: reading Glissant after Chateaubriand shows how the same historical event can be processed with completely different political frameworks.
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