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Books Like Melmoth the Wanderer
Best books to read after Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin
Readers who love Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin are drawn to its combination of the most ambitious and labyrinthine Gothic novel of the Romantic period (nested narratives spanning centuries), the figure of the cursed wanderer who cannot die, and the investigation of what a person will do when suffering is extreme enough. They want works that deal with the Faustian supernatural compact, the wandering cursed figure, and the final flowering of the Romantic Gothic tradition.
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The Monk
by Matthew Lewis
Lewis's companion — the monk Ambrosio's pact with the Devil. The companion as the predecessor: Melmoth inherits from The Monk the supernatural compact and develops the premise over an entire life and structure of nested narratives rather than a single monk's fall
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Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Shelley's companion — the creature and his creator. The companion as the contemporary realization of the same Romantic investigation: both Melmoth the Wanderer and Frankenstein are organized around the figure who has transgressed the boundary between the human and the supernatural, and both investigate the catastrophic consequences
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Vathek
by William Beckford
Beckford's companion — the Caliph's supernatural pursuit. The companion as the Oriental Gothic version: both Vathek and Melmoth are organized around a figure who transgresses the moral and supernatural limits, and both end in supernatural punishment in the lowest halls of the demonic world
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Faust
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The companion — Faust's wager with Mephistopheles. The companion as the German investigation of the same Faustian bargain: both Faust and Melmoth are organized around the figure who has bargained for supernatural power and discovers the cost of that bargain
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Doctor Faustus
by Thomas Mann
Mann's companion — Adrian Leverkühn's pact with the Devil. The companion as the twentieth-century version of the same investigation: where Maturin investigates the Faustian bargain through the Gothic form, Mann investigates it through the humanist biographical novel and the German catastrophe
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's companion — Dorian's portrait and his corruption. The companion as the aestheticist heir: Wilde took the name 'Sebastian Melmoth' in direct homage to Maturin, and The Picture of Dorian Gray is the late Victorian investigation of the same supernatural compact (beauty at the cost of the soul) that Maturin investigates in Melmoth
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The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole
The companion predecessor — the founding text. The companion as the origin of the Gothic tradition that Maturin brings to its most complex and ambitious expression: where Walpole established the conventions, Maturin uses them to build the most elaborate and philosophically complex Gothic structure in the tradition
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The Wandering Jew
by Eugène Sue
Sue's companion — the Wandering Jew and the Wandering Woman across centuries. The companion as the French nineteenth-century version of the same figure: both Melmoth and the Wandering Jew are figures cursed to eternal wandering, both appear at moments of human extremity, and both are organized around the investigation of suffering and the limits of endurance
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