A Group of Eastern Romances and Stories from the Persian, Tamil and Urdu

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
966K words
Chapters
97

Tags

English Originals Folk LiteratureForeign Literature Oriental LegendStory CollectionFolktalesEclectic ReadingNarrative TraditionExotic CultureCultural FusionFolk CustomsPersian LiteratureCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A Group of Eastern Romances and Stories from the Persian, Tamil and UrduAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PJ: Language and Literatures: Oriental languages and literatures, Release Date: Jul 8, 2018

Editor's review

This is an English collection of Eastern tales from the Project Gutenberg, drawn from Persian, Tamil, and Urdu traditional narratives and classified as a public-domain ebook in Oriental languages and literatures (PJ). For Chinese readers, its value lies mainly in offering a window onto how South Asian and Persian folk narratives were retold by early English compilers: the story motifs, framing structures, and storyteller's cadence form an interesting contrast with folk tales familiar to Chinese readers. It is not a strict scholarly critical edition but closer to a storybook for general readers, and is therefore best approached through comparative literature, folk-tale studies, and cross-cultural reading. Read it as source material rather than light fiction, and pay attention to how names, places, and nested narrative layers are handled. Being a public-domain electronic text, its formatting and annotation are plain, so readers need to supplement the background knowledge themselves. Overall, this is a small story collection suited to slow reading, excerpting, and comparative study, best used alongside introductory works in folklore or Oriental studies.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents and opening notes, read by language-source groups, and compare the differences among Persian, Tamil, and Urdu narratives.
  2. Keep a notebook to record recurring story motifs and storyteller formulas for cross-comparison.
  3. Skip unfamiliar place names and proper nouns at first, then return to check them after finishing a tale, so the narrative rhythm is not interrupted.
  4. Read only one or two tales at a time, paired with a piece of relevant folklore background, for better results.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81
  82. 82
  83. 83
  84. 84
  85. 85
  86. 86
  87. 87
  88. 88
  89. 89
  90. 90
  91. 91
  92. 92
  93. 93
  94. 94
  95. 95
  96. 96
  97. 97

FAQ

Is this book a Chinese translation or the English original? According to Project Gutenberg information, this is an English electronic text collecting stories translated from Persian, Tamil, and Urdu; it is not a Chinese translation. Chinese readers need some English reading ability or should read it alongside Chinese reference materials.
Are the stories suitable for telling to children? The stories come from traditional folk narratives, and some plots and ideas carry the color of their time and region and may not all be suitable for children as they are. For parent-child reading, read through and select first, and explain or adapt as needed.
Does the book have scholarly annotations and a bibliography? Judging from its position as a Project Gutenberg public-domain ebook, it is closer to a storybook for general readers, with plain annotation and no reason to expect detailed critical apparatus or a complete bibliography. For research, supplement it with authoritative editions and secondary literature.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Project Gutenberg Author

Project Gutenberg is not a single author but a nonprofit digital library founded by Michael Hart in 1971 and one of the world's earliest free ebook platforms. It relies on volunteers to digitize, proofread, and freely distribute public-domain works and is now operated by the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Its collection contains 2,692 works, mainly religious texts, epics, and story collections, including the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims volumes, the epic Mahabharata, a literal translation of the Arabian Nights, and Danish editions of the Old and New Testaments. Public information is limited, and its nature is closer to a public-interest compiling and dissemination body; these texts are open to the public, easy to consult and circulate, and have had a profound influence on the spread of ebooks and the preservation of public-domain resources.