The Call of the Town: A Tale of Literary Life

John Alexander HammertonProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
311K words
Chapters
32

Tags

English Originals Social Fiction Portrait GalleryWritersUrban LureLiterary CirclesInspirationGrowing UpLiterary LifePopular NarrativeLondon LifeSocial Observation

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.The Call of the Town: A Tale of Literary Life by Sir John Alexander HammertonAuthor: Hammerton, John Alexander, Sir, 1871-1949,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Sep 19, 2010

Editor's review

Written by the prolific British author and editor John Alexander Hamerton, this novel takes literary life as its subject, turning its gaze on the circumstances and choices of people within urban literary circles. It carries the narrative flavor of early twentieth-century English fiction, with polished language and carefully developed relationships; readers encounter both the tension between personal ambition and practical pressures and the atmosphere of the literary world and city life of the time. For readers who enjoy old-fashioned English narrative and are interested in a writer's development and the writing of city life, it offers a light yet rewarding sample. As a public-domain ebook, it is better suited to literary leisure and English reading practice than to strict literary-historical research. While reading, note the narrative rhythm and dialogue, and consider how writers of that era understood "going to the city" and "achieving fame."

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to gauge the narrative rhythm and relationships before deciding your pace
  2. Keep pen and paper to note changes in characters and settings, which helps track the literary social network
  3. Read one chapter a day; guess unfamiliar words before looking them up to maintain continuity
  4. After finishing, review key turning points and trace how the protagonist's attitude toward the city and literature changes

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

FAQ

Is this book suitable for English beginners to read directly? Not really for complete beginners or elementary learners. It is an early twentieth-century English novel with somewhat difficult sentence structures and vocabulary, and no Chinese annotations. It is better suited to readers with intermediate or higher English reading ability who are willing to read slowly, or for use as advanced extensive reading material.
Is this book a literary-historical research source? It is a novel about literary life, not a systematic work of literary history. Its portrayal of writers and the urban literary circle can serve as an impressionistic reference for the atmosphere of the era, but academic research still requires reliable literary histories and critical literature.
What should I keep in mind when reading a public-domain ebook edition? Public-domain ebooks are prepared and proofread by volunteers, and different files may vary in formatting or punctuation. Choose an edition with clear formatting and focus on understanding the narrative while reading; don't let occasional formatting issues affect the overall reading experience.

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

John Alexander Hammerton Author · British · 1871–1949

John Alexander Hammerton (1871–1949) was a British writer and editor. Public information about his early life and education is limited, and his contributions lie mainly in editing and writing. He edited a number of illustrated encyclopedias and popular knowledge series, publications characterized by rich illustrations and accessibility to general readers, which played a role in spreading knowledge. As a writer, his representative works include The Call of the Town: A Tale of Literary Life and In the Track of R. L. Stevenson and Elsewhere in Old France; the former takes literary life as its subject, while the latter follows the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson and travels through old France, showing his interest in literature and travel. Two of his works are held in the collection. Overall, he was both an editor and a writer, and his work tended toward popularization and the dissemination of knowledge.