Recommendations
Books Like Rolla
Best books to read after Rolla by Musset
Musset's most famous narrative poem (1833) — the story of Jacques Rolla, who spends three years dissolving his inheritance in order to die on a fixed night, and the diagnosis of the Romantic generation's spiritual desolation. If this passionate and melancholy long poem moved you, these books explore similar themes.
- 1Buy
Les Nuits
by Alfred de Musset
The lyric sequence that continues the spiritual diagnosis of Rolla into an argument about art and suffering — the companion work that shows what Musset builds after the libertine despair.
- 2Buy
La Confession d'un enfant du siècle
by Alfred de Musset
The prose equivalent of Rolla's diagnosis — the novel that fully develops the 'sickness of the century' argument into a narrative of lost faith, Romantic love, and self-destruction.
- 3Buy
Namouna
by Alfred de Musset
The 1832 Byronic poem that prepares the ground for Rolla — a narrative poem about a libertine that introduces the cultural analysis of the Romantic generation's dissolution.
- 4Buy
Don Juan
by George Gordon Byron
The great Romantic narrative poem that Musset takes as his formal and philosophical model — the same ironic digression, Byronic libertinage, and meditation on the relationship between idealism and dissolution.
- 5Buy
Childe Harold
by George Gordon Byron
Byron's autobiographical narrative poem — the foundational text of the Romantic exile and spiritual desolation that Musset diagnoses as the condition of the French generation of 1830.
- 6Buy
Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The great Romantic novel of spiritual desolation and self-destruction — the cultural predecessor that Musset inherits and transforms in both Rolla and La Confession d'un enfant du siècle.
- 7Buy
Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
The analytical novel of Romantic ambivalence — a different diagnosis of the same generation's spiritual condition, in the mode of ironic self-examination rather than Byronic passion.
- 8Buy
Obermann
by Etienne de Senancour
The epistolary novel of spiritual desolation that Sainte-Beuve ranked alongside René and Werther as one of the three founding texts of French Romantic melancholy.
More Rolla Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.