Chiquita, an American Novel: The Romance of a Ute Chief's Daughter

Tileston, MerrillProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.3
Word count
389K words
Chapters
39

Tags

English Originals Romance Fiction Fate and FortuneLove EntanglementsExotic CultureIndigenous PeoplesCross-Cultural ViewFemale Perspective

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.Chiquita, an American Novel: The Romance of a Ute Chief's Daughter by TilestonAuthor: Tileston, Merrill,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jun 30, 2010

Editor's review

Chiquita, an American Novel: The Romance of a Ute Chief's Daughter is an English-language novel by Merrill Tileston in the category of American and Canadian literature, released by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain e-book. The title and subtitle indicate that the work centers on the emotions and identity of a Ute chief's daughter, with the cross-cultural romance narrative common in American popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its reading value lies in showing how white authors of that era imagined and wrote about Native American women, making it a textual sample for observing race, gender and frontier imagination in popular literature. Readers should maintain a historicized perspective, noting the era's limitations behind narrative viewpoint and characterization, rather than treating it as a reliable record of Native American culture. Suitable for thematic reading by those interested in early American popular fiction, frontier narrative or cross-cultural writing, and for comparative analysis with similar works of the same period.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the subtitle and opening chapters first to grasp the narrative viewpoint, then decide whether to read through or selectively
  2. Record period prejudices in dialogue and description as material for textual analysis
  3. Read alongside American frontier fiction of the same period to compare portrayals of Native American figures
  4. For course use, pair with historical background materials and discuss the novel's popular-literature character

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

FAQ

What is the story background of this novel? The title and subtitle indicate the story centers on a Ute chief's daughter in an American-set romance. Specific plot details require reading the original; the materials provide no more detailed synopsis.
Is this book suitable as material on Native American culture? Not very. It is early twentieth-century popular fiction; Native American figures are filtered through the author's imagination and the ideas of the era, so it is better used for literary textual analysis than as a reliable source of ethnography or historical fact.
How difficult is the English? Can non-native readers manage it? As an old public-domain novel, the language carries the style of its era, and sentence patterns and wording may be less straightforward than modern works. Readers with intermediate English or above can read it with a dictionary, focusing on understanding the narrative and character relationships.

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

Tileston, Merrill Author

Merrill Tileston is an author about whom very little public information is available. To date, only one work is known under this name: the novel Chiquita, an American Novel: The Romance of a Ute Chief's Daughter. As the title and subtitle suggest, the book centers on the romantic story of a Ute chief's daughter, with a clear strain of romance and legend. Its subject matter involves Native American life in the American West and a cross-cultural emotional relationship. Because no reliable information is available about the author's life, nationality, dates, or writing background, it is difficult to offer a full assessment of style or literary standing. The existing material indicates only that the novel leans toward Western romantic narrative and may be of some reference value for understanding how Native American figures were portrayed in popular American fiction of the period.