Atala (novella)
Atala is a romantic novel by François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) from 1801. Atala is the story of a young Christian baptized half-Indian. She gets into a conflict between her love and the chastity she promised her pious mother and kills herself . Atala forms a unit with René : In the first, the Indian Chactas tells the French René about his unhappy love for Atala, the latter contains René's autobiography. Atala is one of the historically most important works of French Romanticism and encompasses essential aspects of this literary current: exoticism , passion and pathos , Catholicism . This work is extremely important in connection with the dispute about the “ noble savage ”, who is here reinterpreted as Christian-Catholic. Rich symbolism of nature, an apparently “Indian” imagery and a melodic, harmonious tone support the impression of unspoilt nature.
- In German: F. de Chateaubriand's Atala. René. The adventures of the last Abencerrag. Series: Selected Works. RUB # 976, 977. Freely translated. v. Friedrich Rückert . Reclam, Leipzig undated [1878]; frequent new editions in different publishers with different. Translators; last: François-René de Chateaubriand, Atala. Novel . Trans. V. Cornelia Hasting. Dörlemann, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-03820-053-6 .
literature
- Winfried Wehle : Departure into the modern age. , therein chap. 4: The tree in the desert. At the zero point of subject experience: Chateaubriand's "René". in the history and prehistory of modern subjectivity 1st ed. Reto Luzius Fetz, Roland Hagenbüchle, Peter Schulz. De Gruyter, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3110149389S. 921–941 (readable online)
