Recommendations
Books Like René
Best books to read after René by Chateaubriand
Readers haunted by Chateaubriand's archetype of Romantic melancholy will find companion works in the French Romantic tradition he founded, in the German predecessors he was developing, and in the literature of the mal du siècle.
- 1Buy
Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
The companion text of French Romantic emotional paralysis — where René is vague and cosmic in his melancholy, Adolphe is precise and analytical about specific emotions in a failed relationship; reading both together shows the two modes of early French Romantic psychological fiction.
- 2Buy
Corinne, or Italy
by Germaine de Staël
The companion French Romantic novel that explores the same themes of alienation and the impossibility of happiness for exceptional souls — de Staël's Corinne is the female complement to René's male melancholy; the two works together define the early French Romantic imagination.
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The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The German predecessor that René is in direct dialogue with — Goethe's Werther (1774) created the first great Romantic male of sentiment who cannot find his place in the world; René is Werther translated into the French Romantic and Catholic context; comparing the two shows exactly what Chateaubriand transformed.
- 4Buy
Confessions
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The French predecessor that underlies René's mode — Rousseau's Confessions and his account of reverie in La Nouvelle Héloïse is the origin of the 'vague des passions' that René diagnoses; Chateaubriand explicitly acknowledged Rousseau as the source of the emotional climate he was describing.
- 5Buy
The Confession of a Child of the Century
by Alfred de Musset
The French novel that is the fullest development of the mal du siècle that René defined — Musset's Octave de T. is René a generation later, the Romantic youth destroyed not by vague melancholy but by specific historical disillusionment after the fall of Napoleon; the most important development of René's emotional world in the next generation.
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Atala
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Chateaubriand's companion tale, published before René and usually paired with it — the story of Atala, a converted Native American woman in Louisiana who kills herself to avoid breaking her vow of chastity; reading Atala alongside René gives the full picture of Chateaubriand's early fiction and its Catholic Romantic framework.
- 7Buy
The Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Chateaubriand's massive posthumously published autobiography — the Mémoires d'outre-tombe is where René's emotional world is explained and contextualized in the full arc of Chateaubriand's life; one of the great autobiographies in any language and the essential companion to all his fiction.
- 8Buy
Obermann
by Étienne Pivert de Senancour
The other great text of French Romantic melancholy, exactly contemporary with René — Senancour's Obermann (1804) is less well-known but equally important; its hero suffers from the same vague des passions as René; the two texts together define the range of the mal du siècle.
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