Recommendations
Books Like Les Natchez
Best books to read after Les Natchez by Chateaubriand
Chateaubriand's Les Natchez (published 1826) is the vast prose epic of the Natchez Indians of Louisiana from which Atala and René were excerpted — featuring extraordinary landscape writing about the Mississippi, Niagara Falls, and the American wilderness, and the Romantic myth of the noble savage destroyed by contact with European civilization.
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Atala
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The short tale excerpted from Les Natchez — the most concentrated and beautiful version of the same material, and the best single point of entry into Chateaubriand's American subject for readers who find the vast epic too demanding.
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René
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The companion tale also excerpted from Les Natchez — where Atala is the American tale of the Christian Indian girl, René is the tale of the French Romantic hero who comes to America seeking an escape from European civilization, and the two together show the two poles of the American material that Les Natchez contains.
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The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper
Cooper's 1826 novel — published the same year as Les Natchez — is the most important American contemporary in the tradition of the North American Indian as Romantic subject, and the comparison shows the French and American versions of the same Romantic myth side by side.
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The Song of Hiawatha
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Longfellow's 1855 poem is the most important American successor in the tradition of the verse epic about Native American civilization — where Chateaubriand's epic is in prose and set in Louisiana, Longfellow's is in verse and set in the Great Lakes, but both belong to the Romantic tradition of the elegy for a destroyed civilization.
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Mémoires d'outre-tombe
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The essential companion autobiography — the American sections of the Mémoires (Books 6-9) give the autobiographical account of the journey that produced Les Natchez, and reading them alongside the epic shows the relationship between the direct experience and the literary transformation.
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Paul et Virginie
by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
The most important immediate French predecessor in the tradition of the pastoral novel of a natural world destroyed by contact with European civilization — the comparison with Les Natchez shows what Chateaubriand added to and transformed in Bernardin's model.
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Les Natchez
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The complete Chateaubriand — reading Les Natchez in context with Atala, René, the Mémoires, and Le Génie du christianisme shows how the American material functions in the full range of Chateaubriand's project.
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Deerslayer
by James Fenimore Cooper
The final Leatherstocking novel is the fullest development of Cooper's engagement with the same Native American world as Les Natchez — the comparison shows the development of the Romantic elegy for Native American civilization from its French origins in Chateaubriand to its fullest American realization in Cooper.
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