Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and the Drama, Vol. 4

Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham, 1810-1897Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
1.3M words
Chapters
127

Tags

English Originals Literary Appreciation LexicographyCharacter SketchPortrait GalleryCharacter GalleryDramatic PortraitsStock CharactersReference ToolPopular Narrative

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.Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and the Drama, Vol. 4 (of 4) by BrewerAuthor: Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham, 1810-1897,Language: English, Class: PN: Language and Literatures: Literature: General, Criticism, Collections, Release Date: Feb 28, 2019

Editor's review

This is the fourth volume of the four-volume series Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and the Drama, by the nineteenth-century English lexicographer Ebenezer Cobham Brewer. Arranged in dictionary-entry form, the book surveys characters from romance, fiction, and drama, and combines the functions of a reference work and a collection of essays; it helps readers trace the types and allusions of Western classic narrative. As a public-domain ebook, it serves as a desk reference for literary research and as casual reading for those interested in Victorian literary taste. Note that the original dates from the nineteenth century, and some of its selections and judgments carry the limitations of their time; readers should use it with a critical eye. This is the original English edition, written in a nineteenth-century lexicographic style, and is best suited to readers with some grounding in English.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Keep it on your desk as a reference work and look up entries when you encounter literary allusions; there is no need to read it through.
  2. Read the preface or the note on the arrangement of entries first to understand how the characters are classified, then choose entries of interest for close reading.
  3. Jot down the source clues given in the entries as you read, and cross-check them against the original works or literary histories.
  4. Stay alert to the period biases in nineteenth-century judgments and check them against modern scholarship.

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
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  49. 49
  50. 50
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  52. 52
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  55. 55
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FAQ

Can this book be read systematically as a textbook of literary history? It is not suited to that use. The book is arranged as character entries and focuses on discrete character sketches and explanations of allusions rather than a literary history organized by period or movement. It is better used as a reference tool or for casual browsing; for systematic study of literary history, choose a general history and use this book as a supplementary reference.
Can I read this book without knowing English or with weak English? This is the original English edition, written in a nineteenth-century lexicographic style whose vocabulary and sentence patterns pose a challenge to modern readers. Readers with weak English will find it difficult; a reading level of intermediate English or above is advisable, or use a dictionary and parallel materials, otherwise it is easy to give up halfway.
What should I keep in mind when using it as a public-domain ebook? This book is released by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain ebook. Note that its text comes from a historical edition and may show period differences in typesetting or punctuation; its judgments also carry nineteenth-century limitations, so they should be weighed critically and not treated directly as modern scholarly conclusions.

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

Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham, 1810-1897 Author

Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (1810–1897) was a nineteenth-century British author and compiler known for reference works that organized knowledge and literary characters. Five of his works are held in this collection, including the four volumes of Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama and A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar. The former sketches figures drawn from romance, fiction, and drama volume by volume, combining reference value with readability; the latter explains the science of everyday things for general readers in plain, orderly language. One literary and one scientific, the two works reflect his aim of spreading knowledge to a broad public and classifying it clearly, and his compiling approach influenced later works of the same kind. Public information is limited, so biographical details remain sparse, yet the surviving works show his wide-ranging sources and practical editorial style.