Letters from the Raven: Correspondence of L. Hearn with Henry Watkin

Hearn, Lafcadio, 1850-1904Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.1
Word count
208K words
Chapters
21

Tags

English Originals Essays and Miscellany CorrespondenceLove EntanglementsLiterary GiantsHumanistic CareExotic CultureCross-Cultural ViewModern Japan

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.Letters from the Raven: Correspondence of L. Hearn with Henry Watkin by HearnAuthor: Hearn, Lafcadio, 1850-1904,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Oct 30, 2017

Editor's review

This book is a collection of letters between Lafcadio Hearn and Henry Watkin, a body of correspondence rather than a narrative work. Hearn was a distinctive stylist in late-nineteenth-century cross-cultural writing, and these letters record his long private exchange with his American friend Watkin in a casual, blunt voice, full of colloquial observations and complaints that differ markedly in tone from Hearn's formally published essays. Readers see how a writer confides daily circumstances, reading tastes and personal ties to a trusted friend, and sense the rhythm and texture of transatlantic correspondence in the late nineteenth century. As a public-domain ebook it is short and easy to obtain, suitable as supplementary material for Hearn studies or as a sample of the epistolary form. Note that there is no continuous plot; the names and backgrounds mentioned in the letters require readers to look them up themselves, and those new to Hearn should read his formal works before turning to this correspondence.

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Reading tips

  1. Read Hearn's formal essays or a short biography first, then return to the letters to hear the contrast between his private voice and his public style.
  2. Read in chronological order and jot down recurring names and places; reviewing them at the end makes the relationships easier to follow.
  3. No need to read it all at once; take a few letters at bedtime or on the commute to preserve the loose feel of correspondence.
  4. Mark unfamiliar people or events, look them up together, then reread the relevant passages to avoid getting stuck.

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

FAQ

Is this book Hearn's memoir or a novel? Neither. It is a compilation of letters Hearn wrote to Henry Watkin, a body of private correspondence with no fictional plot and no continuous memoir structure; read it as letters rather than chapters.
Can readers unfamiliar with Hearn read it directly? They can, but the experience will suffer. The letters assume the recipient shares the background, and names and events go unexplained; learning the outline of Hearn's life and main works first makes the letters much smoother.
What do the letters mainly discuss? The available information only confirms that these are Hearn's letters to Watkin; specific topics require readers to read for themselves. Expect daily news in a private voice and exchanges about writing and reading rather than systematic argument.
Is the electronic edition suitable for scholarly citation? As a public-domain electronic text it is useful for general reading and tracing references, but academic citation should check authoritative editions and page numbers and independently confirm the dating of letters and recipient details rather than relying on the electronic formatting alone.

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

Hearn, Lafcadio, 1850-1904 Author

Hearn, Lafcadio (1850–1904) was an essayist and writer of folk literature who wrote in English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and lived for a long time in Japan. His works draw chiefly on legends, ghost stories and daily life in Japan, China and the Caribbean. Twenty-two of his works are held here, including Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, Some Chinese Ghosts, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: First Series, Kotto, Exotics and Retrospectives and Two Years in the French West Indies. His writing blends foreign observations, folk tales and personal meditation in a cool, vivid style, and has deeply influenced Western understanding of Japanese culture. Because public information is limited, his early life and biographical details are not elaborated here; this note focuses on the subjects and style of his works.