33 works across 27 centuries, back to The Odyssey and The Iliad.
Following one thread, 11 works from A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale) to The Odyssey. Back to all 33 works
1869
Gustave Flaubert
Second Empire. France. written in French.
Flaubert's 1869 novel follows Frédéric Moreau from 1840 through the 1848 Revolution and the coup of 1851, as his lifelong unconsummated love for Madame Arnoux and his drifting ambitions come to nothing. It turns the novel of a young man's education into a study of illusion, inertia and failure.
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1837–1843
Honoré de Balzac
July Monarchy. France. written in French.
Balzac's novel of Lucien de Rubempré, a provincial poet who comes to Paris and is corrupted by journalism and literary commerce.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Balzac's story of a provincial youth who comes to Paris to make his name among journalists, actresses and financiers is the template Flaubert rewrote in a deflated key. Deslauriers even urges Frédéric to remember Rastignac of the Comédie humaine, naming the Balzacian ambition the novel then lets fizzle out.
1814
Walter Scott
Romantic. Scotland. written in English.
Scott's first novel, in which a romance-reading young Englishman is drawn into the Jacobite rising of 1745.
Direct source, well documented.
Lucien arrives in Paris with a historical novel, 'The Archer of Charles IX', written in imitation of Walter Scott, and d'Arthez advises him on how to surpass Scott. Balzac's own preface to the Comédie humaine names Scott as the model for his ambition.
1605–1615
Miguel de Cervantes
Spanish Golden Age. Spain. written in Spanish.
Novel of a country gentleman driven mad by chivalric romances who sets out as a knight errant with his squire Sancho Panza.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
In a letter to Louise Colet of 1852 Flaubert said he found all his origins in Don Quixote, a book he knew by heart before he could read. Frédéric, like Quixote, lives through borrowed literary images and sees them repeatedly fail against the world; the novel is a quixotic story stripped of adventure.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
Emma Bovary's ruin by novel-reading is a feminine, provincial reworking of Quixote's madness from chivalric romances. Critics have long called Emma a 'female Quixote', and Flaubert's stated debt to Cervantes dates from these years of composition.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Edward Waverley's head is filled with romances from undisciplined reading, and his entry into the Jacobite rising is partly a romantic delusion. Scott frames this as a gentler version of Quixote's mistaking of fiction for life.
1516
Ludovico Ariosto
Italian Renaissance. Ferrara, Italy. written in Italian.
Romance epic in ottava rima of Charlemagne's paladins, centred on Orlando's madness for love of Angelica.
Direct source, well documented.
Quixote debates whether to imitate the mad rage of Ariosto's Orlando or the melancholy of Amadis, and the Furioso is discussed during the library scrutiny. Cervantes took both the madness-from-love motif and Ariosto's ironic narrative voice.
1483
Matteo Maria Boiardo
Italian Renaissance. Ferrara, Italy. written in Italian.
Unfinished romance epic of Orlando's love for Angelica, fusing Carolingian heroes with Arthurian love and enchantment.
Direct source, well documented.
Ariosto wrote the Furioso as a continuation of Boiardo's unfinished poem, picking up its characters, plot threads and ottava rima. Orlando's love for Angelica, begun by Boiardo, becomes his madness.
c. 1215–1230
Anonymous
High Middle Ages. France. written in Old French.
Vast prose romance of Lancelot's chivalry and his adulterous love for Queen Guinevere.
Structural model, probable.
The Amadis draws on Arthurian prose romance for its devoted knight, his love for a princess, and its interlaced adventures. Lancelot and Tristan stories circulated widely in Iberian versions and served as the evident pattern.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Boiardo's innovation was to make the Carolingian Orlando a lover in the Arthurian mould. He imported the enchantments, wandering quests and devotion to a lady from the Lancelot and Tristan romances.
c. 1177–1181
Chrétien de Troyes
High Middle Ages. Champagne, France. written in Old French.
Verse romance in which Lancelot, devoted to Guinevere, humiliates himself and risks death to rescue her.
Direct source, well documented.
The Prose Lancelot expands Chrétien's Knight of the Cart, retaining the episode of Lancelot riding in the cart and rescuing Guinevere from Meleagant. The love of knight and queen becomes the axis of the whole cycle.
c. 1136
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Anglo-Norman. England. written in Latin.
Legendary chronicle of Britain from its founding by Brutus to the reign of Arthur and beyond.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Chrétien's court of Arthur, Guinevere and the knights descends from Geoffrey's History, which reached French audiences in Wace's verse adaptation. Geoffrey supplied the setting that Chrétien turned into romance.
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c. 29–19 BCE
Virgil
Augustan Rome. Augustan Rome. written in Latin.
Epic of the Trojan Aeneas's wanderings and his war to found the Roman people in Italy.
Direct source, well documented.
The night raid of Cloridano and Medoro reworks Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus, and the closing duel of Ruggiero and Rodomonte mirrors Aeneas and Turnus. Ariosto's dynastic praise of the Este also follows the Aeneid's celebration of Augustus.
Direct source, well documented.
Geoffrey makes Britain's founder Brutus a great-grandson of Aeneas, grafting British history onto the Aeneid. The exile, prophecy and founding-of-a-nation pattern follows Virgil.
Direct source, well documented.
In Book One Augustine recalls weeping as a schoolboy over the death of Dido while indifferent to his own spiritual death. Virgil's poem is the main literary text he quotes and against which he defines his conversion.
Direct source, well documented.
Books Thirteen and Fourteen of the Metamorphoses retell Aeneas's journey in a compressed, sidelong way, often called Ovid's 'little Aeneid'. Ovid writes consciously in Virgil's wake while subverting his epic seriousness.
c. 700 BCE
Homer
Archaic Greece. Archaic Greece. written in Ancient Greek.
Epic of Odysseus's ten-year journey home from Troy to Ithaca.
Direct source, well documented.
In his early letters Werther calls Homer his cradle-song and reads the Odyssey in the village, comparing his simple life to the scenes with the swineherd Eumaeus. The Homeric idyll is the measure against which his later Ossianic gloom is set.
Structural model, well documented.
The first six books follow the Odyssey: a hero's wanderings by sea, a retrospective tale told at a royal banquet, and a descent to the underworld. Virgil also revisits Odyssean episodes such as the Cyclops.
Direct source, well documented.
Idyll 11 presents the Cyclops Polyphemus of Odyssey Book Nine as a lovesick young herdsman singing to the nymph Galatea. Theocritus regularly reworks Homeric figures into the pastoral mode.
This is one of the oldest surviving works in its tradition; the line ends here.
