Renshaw Fanning's Quest: A Tale of the High Veldt

Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.1
Word count
424K words
Chapters
43

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Wilderness SurvivalLegendary LivesAdventure JourneyFate and FortuneTreasure HuntVengeance and GratitudeSuspenseful PursuitSouth African VeldExotic CultureColonial Era

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.Renshaw Fanning's Quest: A Tale of the High Veldt by Bertram MitfordAuthor: Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jun 20, 2010

Editor's review

This is an adventure novel by the English author Bertram Mitford set in the high veldt of southern Africa, published as a free English original by Project Gutenberg. The work continues the typical style of colonial-era adventure narrative, with the plot revolving around characters' pursuit in the wilderness and scene descriptions carrying a distinct regional flavor. For readers studying English popular literature, the colonial adventure novel genre, or historical imagination of southern Africa, this book offers an analyzable textual sample. The electronic edition is convenient for full-text search and citation, and suits as supplementary material for genre literature courses or comparative reading. When reading, note its period limitations and narrative formulas, and examine them in light of the historical background.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Learn about the late nineteenth-century southern African colonial background before reading to understand characters' motives
  2. Note how wilderness scenes correspond to the characters' pursuit clues and sort out the narrative structure
  3. Read alongside adventure novels of the same period to identify genre formulas and period attitudes
  4. Use the electronic edition to search keywords and organize regional descriptions and character dialogue material

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

FAQ

Is this book suitable as English learning material? It can serve as extensive reading material for intermediate and advanced English learners. The language is narrative English of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, with long sentences. It is advisable to read with a dictionary and background notes; beginners should not use it directly.
What does High Veldt in the title refer to? High Veldt refers to the highland grassland region of southern Africa's interior. It is the geographical setting of the story and also an important environmental element of the adventure narrative.
Is the Project Gutenberg edition reliable? This edition is a free public-domain ebook published in 2010, and the text can be read, searched, and cited. As a public-domain resource, its content is based on the original work that has entered the public domain, and it suits research and study purposes.

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

Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914 Author

Bertram Mitford (1855–1914) was an English writer about whose life relatively little is publicly known; his work consists mainly of colonial adventure fiction. Twenty-seven of his books are held here, commonly classified under inspirational coming-of-age writing, though their actual subjects center on the South African frontier and on military conflicts and pioneering experiences among the Zulu and Matabele. Representative titles include The Sign of the Spider, The King‘s Assegai, Forging the Blades, and Aletta, whose very names evoke spiders, royal spears, blade-forging, and the Boer invasion. His style favors exotic landscapes, tense plots, and themes of masculine adventure and growth, with characters tested in strange and dangerous settings. Because public information is limited, his detailed biography cannot be firmly established, yet these works offer a glimpse of late nineteenth-century English adventure fiction.