By the World Forgot: A Double Romance of the East and West

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
512K words
Chapters
52

Tags

English Originals Romance Fiction Social ObservationAdventure JourneyFate and FortuneLove EntanglementsLove StoryRomanticismEast Meets West19th CenturyExotic CultureCross-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.By the World Forgot: A Double Romance of the East and West by Cyrus Townsend BradyAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Aug 16, 2014

Editor's review

This is an English novel by Cyrus Townsend Brady, classified under American and Canadian literature. The title announces "A Double Romance of the East and West," indicating that the story unfolds against both Eastern and Western settings and centers on a romance plot. As a public-domain literary text, its value lies mainly in genre fiction and popular narrative: readers can observe how early twentieth-century American popular fiction handled exotic settings, cross-cultural encounters, and emotional entanglements, and can also sense how Western writers of that era imagined "the East" and the narrative conventions they employed. A caution is warranted: exotic depictions in such works often carry the limitations and stereotypes of their time, and today's readers would do well to read with a critical eye, separating the pleasure of the plot from the cultural perspective. Suitable as leisure reading in genre fiction, and also as supplementary material for studying popular literature and cross-cultural imagination.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. First clarify the character relationships in the Eastern and Western threads; a simple chart of your own can help avoid confusion when the narrative switches between them.
  2. While reading, note the author's wording and perspective in depicting "the East," keeping brief notes for later cultural-critical analysis.
  3. Read it as leisure genre fiction; there is no need to scrutinize every word—focus on following the romance line and scene transitions.
  4. For research purposes, read it alongside American popular fiction of the same period to compare how exotic settings are used.

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

FAQ

Is this book a dual narrative? The title announces "A Double Romance of the East and West," indicating that the story unfolds in both Eastern and Western settings and is organized around a romance line. Whether it alternates chapters or divides into sections must be determined from the original structure; clarifying the character relationships in the two threads will make reading smoother.
Are the depictions of the East in the book reliable? As early twentieth-century American popular fiction, its exotic depictions very likely carry the limitations and stereotypes of their time and should not be treated as material for understanding real Eastern societies. A better approach is to read it as a text for studying how the West imagined "the East," with a critical eye.
Is the English difficulty suitable for ordinary readers? The materials provide no difficulty rating. As popular fiction, the narrative is usually fairly coherent, and readers with a college-level English foundation or access to a dictionary can generally get through it; old-fashioned expressions and exotic vocabulary may pose obstacles, so it is advisable to read the first few chapters to judge whether it suits you.
Is this book suitable for literary research? It can serve as supplementary material on American popular literature and cross-cultural imagination, especially for examining how early twentieth-century Western writers handled exotic settings and romance narratives. But it should not stand alone as a core text for classic literary study; it is best analyzed alongside other works of the same period.

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.