The Card, a Story of Adventure in the Five Towns

Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.0
Word count
427K words
Chapters
43

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Entrepreneurial JourneySocial ObservationPortrait GalleryLegendary LivesSuccess MindsetHumor ReliefSatirical Style

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 Card, a Story of Adventure in the Five Towns by Arnold BennettAuthor: Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jul 22, 2004

Editor's review

This is Arnold Bennett's adventure story set in the English "Five Towns" and one of the more representative works in his Five Towns series. The experiences of the protagonist Denry Machin have a light comic flavor; Bennett, in a calm and slightly ironic tone, writes about how an ordinary young man climbs upward in local society through cleverness and luck, combining the readability of an adventure plot with delicate observation of local customs, class mobility, and commercial society. Its value lies not in thrilling excitement but in preserving, through popular narrative, the social landscape and linguistic texture of a late nineteenth-century English industrial town. For Chinese readers familiar with English realist literature, this book can serve as an accessible entry point for understanding Bennett's Five Towns world; for general readers, it is moderate in length and brisk in plotting, suitable for reading in segments during commutes or travel. Note that this is a public-domain ebook in the original English, so reading it requires some English proficiency and attention to local expressions and historical context.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read one chapter first to get a feel for Bennett's calm, restrained narrative tone, then decide on your reading pace.
  2. When you encounter Five Towns place names and local customs, jot down brief notes for easy cross-reference.
  3. Treat it as a novel of social manners rather than a pure adventure story, and pay attention to the class implications behind characters' words and actions.
  4. Readers with basic English can first read through for plot, then go back to dialogue and ironic passages.

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 in Chinese or the original English? This is a public-domain English ebook released by Project Gutenberg; the text is in English, not a Chinese translation. It suits readers with some English reading ability; beginner readers may need a dictionary or annotated comparison.
Can I read this directly without having read other Five Towns works by Bennett? Yes. The story is relatively self-contained and does not depend on the plots of other works. However, the Five Towns is a shared setting across many of Bennett's works; understanding its overall setup first will make it easier to appreciate the details and irony of local society in this book.
Is this book suitable for learning English? It can be used as extensive reading material, but it contains local expressions and period background, and its language is not entirely equivalent to modern simplified readers. It is recommended for readers at intermediate level or above, focusing on understanding plot and context rather than reading word by word.

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About the author

Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931 Author

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English novelist, essayist and playwright. Publicly available information is limited, so his early life and education cannot be described in detail, but his work is clearly recognisable. He often set his writing in the five pottery towns of Staffordshire, his home region, portraying the daily livelihoods and emotional ups and downs of ordinary people in a meticulous, restrained style, and revealing character and circumstance through everyday detail. The collection here holds 45 of his works, including The Old Wives' Tale, Riceyman Steps, Clayhanger and several Five Towns story collections, as well as essays such as The Author's Craft and How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. His writing thus spans fiction and essays on life and the craft of writing, drawing its material from ordinary life with a plain style and close observation.