The Critic in the Orient
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- General readers interested in modern Western travel literature and travel essays
- Students of literature and history researching cross-cultural images and the "West looks at the East" discourse
- Teachers and book club members seeking classroom discussion material
- Readers who enjoy observing how ideas change over time through old texts
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking practical, contemporary travel information about the East
- Readers expecting systematic historical verification or scholarly monographs
- Readers sensitive to biased statements in early Western perspectives
Reading tips
- Read the preface and table of contents first to grasp the author's itinerary and themes, then select chapters for close reading.
- Mark the author's criteria of judgment and his omissions as you read, building your own list of questions.
- Read alongside a modern work of cross-cultural studies and compare the differences in perspective.
- Write a short response to one of the book's claims and test whether its argument holds.
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
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
FAQ
Is this book a travel guide or cultural commentary?
Can I read it without relevant historical background?
Are its views outdated today?
Comments
Find this 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
George Hamlin Fitch (1852–1925) was an American journalist and literary critic, born on November 25, 1852, in Lancaster, New York, and a graduate of Cornell University. He worked for the New York Tribune and from 1879 served for many years as chief book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle until his retirement in 1915. Three of his works are included here: Comfort Found in Good Old Books, Modern English Books of Power, and The Critic in the Orient. His bookish essays are warm and lucid, centering on the reading of classics and the spiritual comfort books can offer, combining a critic's insight with a journalist's accessible tone and advocating finding solace and strength in good books. Public information on other details of his life is limited. He died in 1925.
