A Veldt Vendetta

Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.8

Word count: 370K words
Chapters: 37

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 Veldt Vendetta by Bertram MitfordAuthor: Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jun 19, 2010

Editor's review

Also by Bertram Mitford, A Veldt Vendetta is a revenge narrative set on the South African veldt. Mitford habitually sets vast wilderness against the grudges and entanglements of his characters, and this book follows that pattern: the harshness of the frontier environment and human obsession set each other off, forming the core tension of his adventure fiction. As a Project Gutenberg public-domain ebook, it is freely available and serves well as a sample of colonial-era popular literature, as well as a text for scholars studying British imperial frontier narratives to analyze by genre. Readers should note that the work carries the narrative prejudices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; its portrayals of ethnic groups and violence call for a historicized reading and should not be taken as an objective picture of South African society.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Genre readers interested in colonial-era revenge adventure fiction
Scholars working on Mitford or on British imperial frontier literature
Readers who want a free public-domain English novel for close-reading practice
Readers curious about depictions of South African veldt geography and frontier life

Not a good fit for

Readers who prefer contemporary literary values and resist old colonial narratives
Those who need a Chinese translation or extensive notes to read smoothly
Readers expecting rigorous historical scholarship rather than fictional narrative

Reading tips

Begin with the opening description of the veldt and note how geography drives the revenge plot.
List the revenge mainline and the characters' motives to see the narrative rhythm and turns clearly.
After reading, consult an overview of contemporaneous South African history to distinguish literary imagination from historical fact.
If using it for research, excerpt passages with period prejudices for critical analysis.

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.

FAQ

How is this book related to 'Tween Snow and Fire?

Both are English public-domain ebooks by Bertram Mitford published by Project Gutenberg and both involve a South African frontier setting, but A Veldt Vendetta centers on a revenge theme on the veldt. It is an independent work, not a sequel to the former, and the two can be read separately.

What does Veldt in the title mean?

Veldt (often written veld) refers to the open grassland areas of South Africa and southern Africa and is a common image in the region's geography and literature. The title uses it to indicate the natural setting of the story and to suggest the desolation and harshness of frontier life; understanding the word helps capture the book's atmosphere.

Is there a Chinese version of this book?

According to the available information, this is an English public-domain ebook published by Project Gutenberg, with no mention of a Chinese translation. Chinese readers who wish to read it can use the original English with a dictionary or look for a Chinese translation from another publisher.

Comments

Find this book

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

Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914 Author

Bertram Mitford (1855–1914) was an English writer about whose life relatively little is publicly known; his work consists mainly of colonial adventure fiction. Twenty-seven of his books are held here, commonly classified under inspirational coming-of-age writing, though their actual subjects center on the South African frontier and on military conflicts and pioneering experiences among the Zulu and Matabele. Representative titles include The Sign of the Spider, The King‘s Assegai, Forging the Blades, and Aletta, whose very names evoke spiders, royal spears, blade-forging, and the Boer invasion. His style favors exotic landscapes, tense plots, and themes of masculine adventure and growth, with characters tested in strange and dangerous settings. Because public information is limited, his detailed biography cannot be firmly established, yet these works offer a glimpse of late nineteenth-century English adventure fiction.