From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
(Redirected from
Oberman)
Obermann is a novel by
Étienne Pivert de Senancour first published in
1804 in France. The novel has
never lost its popularity with a limited class of readers.
Obermann, which is to a great extent inspired by
Rousseau, was edited and praised successively by
Sainte-Beuve and by
George Sand, and had a considerable influence both in France and
England, where it was admired by
Matthew Arnold. It consists a
series of letters supposed to be written by a
solitary and
melancholy person, whose headquarters are placed in a
lonely valley of the
Jura. The
idiosyncrasy of the book in the large class of
Wertherian-
Byronic literature consists in the fact that the
hero, instead of feeling the
vanity of things, recognizes his own inability to be and do what he wishes. While
Chateaubriand's
novella René was appreciated by some of the ruling spirits of the century,
Obermann was understood only by the highly gifted, sensitive temperaments, usually
strangers to success.
Obermann has been translated into English twice; by
A.E. Waite (1903), with a biographical and critical introduction, and by J. Anthony Barnes (1910).