The Master-Christian

Corelli, Marie, 1855-1924Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
1.3M words
Chapters
127

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Human NatureHumanistic CareComplex HumanitySpiritual PracticeSocial CritiqueWestern ThoughtIntellectual Commentary

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 Master-Christian by Marie CorelliAuthor: Corelli, Marie, 1855-1924,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jul 1, 2003

Editor's review

The Master-Christian is a novel by Marie Corelli, and the title alone signals its strongly moral and religious speculative bent. Corelli was a prolific writer of popular British fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and her work attracted readers with intense emotional conflict, sharp contrasts between good and evil, and criticism of social hypocrisy. This book follows the same pattern, building its narrative around the tension between faith, conscience, and worldly power; the characters' positions are clear, and argument and plot are interwoven, giving it the typical flavor of late Victorian popular fiction. For readers studying British popular literature of the period, religious-themed fiction, or women writers, the book offers a text open to analysis; as a public-domain eBook from Project Gutenberg, it is easily accessible and suitable as background reading in literary history or as supporting material for specialized research. Note its didactic tendency and historical limitations; readers should approach it critically rather than as contemporary religious reading.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Learn about Corelli's historical context first; the text's issues are easier to grasp afterward.
  2. Read argumentative passages separately from plot passages and note how the author expresses her positions.
  3. Read alongside other popular fiction of the same period to compare themes and techniques.
  4. Maintain a critical perspective while reading, distinguishing period attitudes from literary value.

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
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FAQ

Is this book religious propaganda? It is a novel with a strong moral and religious speculative bent and a heavy argumentative component, but it cannot simply be equated with a religious tract. It reflects the faith-versus-worldly conflict common in late nineteenth-century British popular fiction and should be read as literature and as a period text, not as doctrinal reading.
Can I understand it without a religious background? Basically yes. The characters' positions are clear and the plotlines are fairly distinct, so readers unfamiliar with Christian background can still grasp the main conflicts; however, some knowledge of the religious and social context of the time in Britain will make it easier to understand the targets of the book's arguments and the author's attitude.
How difficult is the book to read? The original is in English, with sentence patterns and vocabulary characteristic of late nineteenth-century popular fiction, and it contains many argumentative passages, so the reading pace is slow. Readers with intermediate English can get through it with a dictionary; if you only want the gist, you can read the beginnings and ends of chapters first to grasp the main storyline.

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

Corelli, Marie, 1855-1924 Author

Marie Corelli (1855–1924) was a British popular novelist active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; her real name and biographical details remain difficult to establish because public sources are limited. The library holds fourteen of her works, including A Romance of Two Worlds, The Sorrows of Satan, Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self, The Secret Power, Thelma, Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul, The Treasure of Heaven, and Innocent: Her Fancy and His Fact. Her fiction often uses romance as a framework while incorporating mysticism, the supernatural, religious fantasy, and moral allegory, with elaborate plotting and bold imagination. She was widely read in the late Victorian period, and her work had some influence on popular fantasy fiction, though critical assessments of her writing have long been mixed.