Don Orsino

Crawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion), 1854-1909Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.5

Word count: 836K words
Chapters: 84

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.Don Orsino by F. Marion CrawfordAuthor: Crawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion), 1854-1909,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Aug 19, 2004

Editor's review

Don Orsino is a novel by the 19th-century American writer F. Marion Crawford, part of his series of social-manners novels set in Italy. Crawford lived in Italy for many years and observed Roman aristocratic and bourgeois life closely; this book continues his narrative style of elaborating family relations, social etiquette, and emotional entanglements. As a free electronic text from Project Gutenberg, this edition is easy to search and cite, and serves as supplementary reading for research on late-19th-century Anglo-American popular fiction and transnational themes. Readers should note how the author handles the tension between an American perspective and Italian subject matter, and how class, marriage, and honor are presented in popular fiction. Because the original is a public-domain English e-book without a modern introduction or notes, readers must situate it historically themselves; reading it alongside materials on Crawford's life and post-unification Italian society is recommended for a fuller understanding.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Literature students studying 19th-century American popular fiction and transnational themes
General readers interested in Anglo-American social-manners novels set in Italy
Researchers who need a public-domain English electronic text for textual searching or citation
Advanced English readers accustomed to reading full-length novels in the original English

Not a good fit for

Readers who want a Chinese translation and are not comfortable with English originals
Readers who prefer fast-paced plots and lack patience for long social-manners description
Beginning readers who need modern notes and introductions to understand the historical background

Reading tips

Read a brief account of Crawford's life and post-unification Italian society before starting the text.
Proceed chapter by chapter and note character relationships as you go, to avoid confusion from the many family threads.
Read it alongside the author's other Italian-themed novels to observe continuities in his narrative mode.
Use the electronic text's search function to locate keywords and support thematic analysis.

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.

FAQ

Does this electronic edition include a Chinese translation or notes?

This edition comes from Project Gutenberg and is a public-domain English e-book; it contains no Chinese translation and no modern editorial notes or introduction. Readers need English reading ability and should supplement the historical background themselves.

Can I read this directly without having read other works by Crawford?

Yes. Although this book belongs to the author's series of Italian-themed novels, it can generally be read independently. Still, knowing about the author's years in Italy and the late-19th-century social background will make the etiquette descriptions and class issues easier to grasp.

Is this book suitable for academic citation?

As a public-domain electronic text, it can be used for close reading and checking quotations, but it lacks authoritative edition information and page numbers. For formal academic writing, consult an authoritative print edition and cite the electronic source.

Comments

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About the author

Crawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion), 1854-1909 Author

F. Marion Crawford (Francis Marion Crawford, 1854–1909) was a notably prolific English-language novelist. The library holds 46 of his works, spanning a wide range of subjects: long novels set in Italy, such as Saracinesca, Greifenstein and Fair Margaret: A Portrait; the two-volume Ave Roma Immortalis, which portrays the history and monuments of Rome; the Arabian tale Khaled, A Tale of Arabia; and atmospheric ghost stories including The Upper Berth and Wandering Ghosts. These works show a writer skilled at evoking foreign and historical settings, with clear narrative structure and steady plotting, accomplished both in popular long fiction and in tales of the strange. His supernatural stories in particular have been favored by later anthologies and have had some influence on the English ghost-story tradition. Because public information is limited, biographical details are not elaborated here; the outline above rests on the works in the library's holdings.