Recommendations
Books Like Oberman
Best books to read after Oberman by Sénancour
Readers who respond to Oberman's radical refusal of consolation, its austere Alpine landscape, and the philosophical precision of its treatment of the Romantic mal du siècle will find the wider tradition of French Romantic introspective fiction.
- 1Buy
René
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The near-contemporary treatment of the same Romantic mal du siècle: René is more theatrical and dramatically resolved than Oberman, but it established the type of the restless Romantic self that cannot find adequate experience, which Sénancour's novel treats with greater austerity.
- 2Buy
Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
Constant's short novel is the most analytically precise treatment of the Romantic incapacity for love that Oberman represents: where Oberman refuses all human connection, Adolphe dissects the connection that is made and found to be inadequate.
- 3Buy
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
La Nouvelle Héloïse is the founding text of the Alpine Romantic world that Oberman inhabits: Rousseau's Alpine landscape is one in which nature can still console and the virtuous life can still be achieved; Oberman is the same landscape after the Revolution, when those consolations have become unavailable.
- 4Buy
The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe's Werther solves the problem of the self that cannot find adequate experience through suicide, making it the most dramatically resolved of the Romantic treatments of the mal du siècle; Oberman refuses that resolution, making Sénancour's novel the more honest but less satisfying of the two.
- 5Buy
Poems on the Alps (Oberman poems)
by Matthew Arnold
Arnold's two Oberman poems ('Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Oberman,' 1849; 'Oberman Once More,' 1867) are the most eloquent critical responses to Sénancour ever written, and reading them alongside or after Oberman deepens the understanding of what Arnold found truthful in it.
- 6Buy
Confession of a Child of the Century
by Alfred de Musset
Musset's autobiographical novel is the most direct French Romantic treatment of the generation that grew up after the Revolution and found the world inadequate to their expectations — the same diagnosis Sénancour made but now placed explicitly in the post-Napoleonic historical context.
- 7Buy
Dominique
by Eugène Fromentin
Fromentin's 1863 novel is often described as the last great French Romantic novel of renunciation: a man recalls an impossible love from his youth and reflects on the life he has built from the ruins of his early romantic self — an austere, late treatment of the Sénancour predicament.
- 8Buy
Mémoires d'outre-tombe
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Chateaubriand's great autobiography contains the same incapacity for consolation that characterizes Oberman, but places it in the context of a full life rather than an Alpine retreat: the Mémoires are the record of how the Romantic self survives and continues after its ideals have been disappointed.
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