Ourika
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Students and enthusiasts interested in French literature and works by women writers
- Readers studying early literary expressions of race, identity and colonial discourse
- General readers who want to approach eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European fiction in a shorter form
- University teachers and students who need a free public-domain English ebook for course reading
Not a good fit for
- Readers of popular fiction expecting fast-paced plots and strong dramatic conflict
- Researchers who want a detailed historical study or a heavily annotated edition
- Readers impatient with the sentimental narrative style
Reading tips
- Read once through to grasp the narrator's emotional line, then review the characters' situation against the social background after the French Revolution.
- Read alongside other early texts on race and identity, noting the limits of the narrative perspective.
- In the English edition, note the register of the translation and, where necessary, consult the French original or a related introduction for deeper understanding.
- The work is short enough to read in two or three sittings; after each, record the key moments in the narrator's psychological change.
About the publisher
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
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About the author
Claire de Duras, Duchess of Duras (née Claire de Kersaint, 1777–1828), was a French novelist and salon hostess, born in Brest and died in Nice. She is known for her novel Ourika, published in 1823, which addresses racial and gender equality and is an important early work on these themes. Her other work Edouard likewise focuses on the fate of marginalized figures during the French Revolution. Her writing often takes the situation of society's outsiders as its point of departure, with a delicate and restrained style, and holds a noteworthy place in early nineteenth-century French women's writing. Three of her works are held in the collection; public information on the details of her life is limited, and scholarly attention tends to center on the themes and ideas of her works.
