Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of Home

Taylor, Bayard, 1825-1878Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
484K words
Chapters
49

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Tales of HomeChildhood MemoryTender SentimentBeauty and GoodnessMoral AllegoryFantasy StoriesHeartwarming StoriesShort StoriesFairy Tale AdaptationExotic Tales

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.Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of Home by Bayard TaylorAuthor: Taylor, Bayard, 1825-1878,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jun 29, 2008

Editor's review

Bayard Taylor was a nineteenth-century American writer and traveller. Titled Beauty and the Beast, this book is in fact a collection of short stories: retellings based on European folktales alongside tales of home and country. The title piece carries on the classic theme of outward appearance versus inner worth in a gentle style well suited to reading aloud; the other stories mostly concern family, local life and human feeling, with the leisurely pace and moral concern of old-fashioned fiction. Unlike today's dark retellings, the narrative here is closer to a version told to family, valuing kindness, promise and decency. For readers tracing the evolution of the fairy-tale text or preferring gentle classical narrative, the book has a distinctive documentary and reading value; as light reading in the English original, it also conveys the feel of nineteenth-century American prose. Best read slowly in quiet hours.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the title story first, then the tales of home and country, noting the shift from fairy tale to realism.
  2. Try reading aloud; the old-fashioned punctuation and dialogue rhythms are easier to appreciate when spoken.
  3. While reading the title story, compare it with a familiar animation or translation and note differences in plot choices and moral emphasis.
  4. Read over several sittings and jot down character relationships after each story to avoid confusion from the large cast typical of old-fashioned narrative.

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

FAQ

How does the Beauty and the Beast here differ from common versions? This is a nineteenth-century retelling by the American writer Bayard Taylor, whose language and structure bear the mark of its time; the tone is gentle and stresses family and moral meaning, with a plainer plot than later animated or dark versions. It is best read as a reference for comparing versions and tracing textual evolution.
Why are there other stories when the title is Beauty and the Beast? This is a short-story collection that takes its best-known piece as the title; the other stories mostly concern family and local life. Each stands alone, so you can read only the title story or the whole collection to see the author's range.
Is it suitable for reading to children? The title story is gentle and suits parent-child read-alouds, but the other stories are aimed at adults, with varying themes and difficulty. Parents should look through the book first and choose suitable pieces rather than reading the whole volume aloud.
How difficult is the English original? The text is nineteenth-century American prose, with long sentences and fairly formal diction, but the storylines are clear and unfamiliar words mostly relate to setting and characters. Readers with basic English can finish it with a dictionary; for study, start with the title story and gradually move on to the others.

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About the author

Taylor, Bayard, 1825-1878 Author

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) was an American writer, represented in this collection by ten works. Public information about him is limited, so this note focuses on the subjects of his writings. He worked mainly in travel writing and fiction. His representative works include Travels in Arabia, Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland, Views A-foot Or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff, and The Lands of the Saracen; these are largely based on actual journeys and are notable for their detailed observation and personal reflection. His novels The Story of Kennett and Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania are set against local life in Pennsylvania and pay close attention to character and regional setting. He also wrote A History of Germany from the Earliest Times to the Present Day and the story collection Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of Home. His works combine geographical description with literary narrative and offer some reference value for understanding nineteenth-century European and American travel literature.