Although Etienne de Senancour published many philosophical, historical, and critical works during his lifetime, he has gained a place in literary history principally as the author of Oberman (1804), a novel prized and promoted, along with François-René de Chateaubriand's René (1805) and Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816), by the younger generation of French Romantics as an expression of the unhappiness, frustration, and disillusionment termed le mal du siècle(the sickness of the century). The legend of Senancour's suffering and hesitant hero thus contributed to shaping a literary current dominant in French letters through the middle of the nineteenth century. Influenced strongly by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761; translated as Julie, or the New Eloisa, 1773) and Jacques Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Etudes de la nature (Nature Studies, 1784-1788), Oberman is distinguished from the contemporary works of Chateaubriand and Constant both by its...