The French Prisoners of Norman Cross: A Tale

Arthur BrownProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.7
Word count
159K words
Chapters
16

Tags

English Originals Historical Fiction War TraumaPrisoner of War CampNapoleonic WarsHuman NatureEnglish Countryside

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 French Prisoners of Norman Cross: A Tale by Rev. Arthur BrownAuthor: Brown, Arthur, Rev.,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Dec 12, 2007

Editor's review

This work tells its story around the situation of French prisoners of war at Norman Cross. The author treats the prison camp as historical material in novelistic form, letting readers encounter the life behind the front lines through narrative. As a public-domain e-book, its textual value lies in offering a sample of a subject rarely noticed by Chinese readers in nineteenth-century English literature. The narrative pace is traditional, with characters' fates interwoven with camp daily life, making it suitable as supplementary reading for understanding prisoner-of-war literature. The depiction of the relationship between foreign prisoners and their local surroundings offers historical enthusiasts a vivid sense of the period and can also serve as auxiliary reading in English literature classrooms. Readers need not seek strong dramatic plotting, but should attend to how the author presents human nature under the shadow of war through everyday details. The electronic edition facilitates searching and excerpting, making it suitable for thematic reading or organizing materials.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. First learn the basic historical background of the Norman Cross prisoner-of-war camp, then enter the story, to better understand the characters' situation.
  2. Take brief notes chapter by chapter, recording details of interaction between prisoners and locals, to aid later review of themes.
  3. Read alongside other war-themed novels of the same period to observe differences in how various authors treat prisoner-of-war subjects.
  4. Use the e-edition's search function to organize recurring images or scenes in the book and form your own reading threads.

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

FAQ

Is this book historical reportage or a fictional novel? From the materials, the subtitle identifies it as "A Tale," indicating a narrative work rather than strict historical scholarship. It draws on the historical background of French prisoners at Norman Cross but unfolds in novelistic form; readers should treat it as literary narrative, not cite it directly as historical source material.
How difficult is the English, and what level of reader is it suitable for? The work is a nineteenth-century English literary text, with sentence patterns and vocabulary bearing period characteristics; the overall difficulty is above average. Readers with college English proficiency (CET-4 or above) or those accustomed to reading classic English novels are advised to attempt it; beginning readers may use an annotated edition or read Chinese background materials first before entering the original text.
What reading conveniences does the electronic edition offer? As a public-domain e-book, the text can be freely searched, excerpted, and copied, making it convenient for readers to organize threads by character, place, or theme. It is also easy to adjust font size for reading on tablets or computers, suitable for thematic reading notes and cross-text comparison, though it lacks the browsing experience of a paper book.

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

Arthur Brown Author

Brown, Arthur, Rev., is an English-language author about whom relatively little biographical information is available; his nationality, dates of birth and death, and educational background cannot be confirmed in currently accessible public sources. Only one work by him is held in the collection, The French Prisoners of Norman Cross: A Tale. The title "Rev." indicates that he held a clerical position, a designation common among writers in Britain at the time. The book takes as its subject French prisoners of war held at the Norman Cross depot in England during the Napoleonic Wars and belongs to the genre of historical fiction, using the characters and experiences of the prison camp to develop its story, with clear marks of its period and a moral concern. Because biographical material is scarce, a full assessment of his style and influence must await further sources; for now, readers can approach his narrative tendencies only through this single work.