Recommendations
Books Like William Shakespeare
Best books to read after William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo
Hugo's greatest critical work (1864) — a philosophical essay on the nature of genius and the poet's prophetic function, using Shakespeare as the occasion for a meditation on Homer, Dante, Cervantes, and the tradition of the great geniuses of humanity. If this powerful argument about art and prophecy inspired you, these books explore similar territory.
- 1Buy
Les Contemplations
by Victor Hugo
The great lyric companion — the poetic realization of the theory of genius that William Shakespeare develops; reading both together gives the argument and its demonstration.
- 2Buy
La Légende des siècles
by Victor Hugo
The philosophical epic — the most ambitious practical application of the theory of the prophetic poet that William Shakespeare articulates; the poems are what the essay describes.
- 3Buy
Préface de Cromwell
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's earlier great critical manifesto (1827) — the companion theoretical text that establishes the foundations of Romantic aesthetics that William Shakespeare develops and completes forty years later.
- 4Buy
The Lives of the Poets
by Samuel Johnson
Johnson's great critical biographies — the closest English parallel to Hugo's critical approach: a strong personal intelligence engaged with a tradition of great writers, making large claims about the nature of genius and its social function.
- 5Buy
Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge's great critical work — the most direct English parallel to Hugo's theory of imagination and genius, developing similar Romantic arguments about the poet's prophetic function from a very different philosophical tradition.
- 6Buy
De l'Allemagne
by Germaine de Staël
Staël's great critical work (1810) — the predecessor of Hugo's theoretical ambition, which introduced German Romantic ideas into France and established the critical vocabulary that Hugo develops in William Shakespeare.
- 7Buy
Racine et Shakespeare
by Stendhal
Stendhal's Romantic manifesto (1823-1825) — the polemical critical text that established the terms of the Romantic-versus-Classical debate that Hugo's William Shakespeare finally resolves in favor of the Romantic tradition.
- 8Buy
Sur Shakespeare
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Chateaubriand's translations and essays on Shakespeare — the immediate predecessor of Hugo's engagement with Shakespeare, part of the great Romantic project of discovering Shakespeare as the alternative to French Classicism.
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