Books with author Samuel. Butler

The Odyssey is an ancient epic poem by Homer. The story revolves around the Greek hero Ulysses (alternatively Odysseus) and his journey home after the fall of TroyThe poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon. It is believe to have been composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.Samuel Butler’s translation of the original Greek into English is one of the seminal achievements of Butler’s authorship and a classic of English literature.

Following in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," Samuel Butler published "Erewhon" privately in 1872. Arguably the first first anti-Utopian or dystopian novel, Erewhon anticipates later and better known works such as Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and George Orwell's "1984." Whereas More and other utopianists were primarily interested in attacking society's ills and making the world a better place, the anti-utopians engaged primarily in either satire of the society in which they lived or in making dire predictions about the dismal fate that awaits humanity. Butler is most decidedly in the former category, since he proves in not only "Erewhon" but also his more famous work, the semi-autobiographical novel, "The Way of All Flesh," that his main concern is in attacking the complacency and hypocrisy he saw infecting Victorian society. Like More's island of Utopia, Butler's Erewhon is a remote kingdom, not to be found on any map, which is discovered by the narrator of the novel (biographers of Butler have assumed it is modeled on a part of New Zealand, which anyone who has viewed the "Lord of the Rings" movies can attest has some spectacular landscapes). Cut off from the rest of the world, the citizens of Erewhon live according to their own rules and dictates. Butler breaks from the tradition of creating an idealized world in favor of a more realistic society. In Butler's world money, the rich, the poor, and even a monarchy still exist. It is when we notice strong parallels between Erewhon and the members of Victorian society that we start to see Butler's true purpose. Hypocrisy is rampant in Erewhon, where citizens think nothing of agreeing with things they do not believe in and their friends know that they do so. While the citizens pretend to worship deities that are the personification of lofty human qualities such as love, justice, and hope, they really worship a goddess, Ydrgun, and the Church of England is transformed into the system of "Musical Banks." As Butler hits his stride in this novel he creates a topsy-turvy world where illness is treated as a crime (there are no physicians in the country) and criminal behavior, such as theft, are seen as minor weaknesses in character. Unlike Francis Bacon's utopian work "The New Atlantis," where science was seen as the salvation of humanity that would correct all ills and provide all necessities, Butler's world has outlawed machinery because they might one day become the masters rather than the servants of humanity. Clearly Butler was no more enamored of the Industrial Revolution than he was of Victorian society. In many ways this is the section of "Erewhon" where Butler makes his most cogent arguments. It is also the point where the book's narrator, whose initial attitude of admiration turns to one of surprise, now becomes one of condemnation as the eccentricities of the citizens of Erewhon are fully revealed. Ultimately, the shortcomings Butler sees in them are the same of which he accuses British society, politics, and religion. Because Butler is satirizing Victorian society his value to modern readers remains inferior to that of Huxley and Orwell, not to mention Edward Bellamy ("Looking Backward 2000-1887") and Yevgeny Zamyatin ("We"). However, in many ways "Erewhon" is a pivotal novel in the history of utopian literature, not only because of how it sets the stage for what other forgotten writers of dystopian fiction, but because it remains one of those novels where historical significance outweighs literary appeal.

Is a novel by Samuel Butler which was first published anonymously in 1872. The title is also the name of a country, supposedly discovered by the protagonist. In the novel, it is not revealed where Erewhon is, but it is clear that it is a fictional country. Butler meant the title to be read as "nowhere" backwards even though the letters "h" and "w" are transposed, as it would have been pronounced in his day (and still is in some dialects of English). The book is a satire on Victorian society.The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–1864), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and which he wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).The greater part of the book consists of a description of Erewhon. The nature of this nation is intended to be ambiguous. At first glance, Erewhon appears to be a Utopia, yet it soon becomes clear that this is far from the case. Yet for all the failings of Erewhon, it is also clearly not a dystopia, such as that depicted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a satirical utopia, Erewhon has sometimes been compared to Gulliver's Travels (1726), a classic novel by Jonathan Swift; the image of Utopia in this latter case also bears strong parallels with the self-view of the British Empire at the time. It can also be compared to the William Morris novel, News from Nowhere.Erewhon satirises various aspects of Victorian society, including criminal punishment, religion and anthropocentrism. For example, according to Erewhonian law, offenders are treated as if they were ill, whereas ill people are looked upon as criminals. Another feature of Erewhon is the absence of machines; this is due to the widely shared perception by the Erewhonians that they are potentially dangerous. This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin's evolution theory; Butler had read On the Origin of Species soon after it was published in 1859.

Excerpt from The Authoress of the Odyssey: Where and When She Wrote, Who She Was, the Use She Made of the Iliad, and How the Poem Grew Under Her HandsNo reply appeared to either of my letters to the Atlwnoeum nor to my Italian pamphlets. It is idle to suppose that the leading Iliadic and Odyssean scholars in England and the continent do not know What I have said. I have taken ample care that they should be informed concerning it. It is equally idle to suppose that not one of them should have brought forward a serious argument against me, if there were any such argument to bring. Had they brought one it must have reached me, and I should have welcomed it with great pleasure; for, as I have said in my concluding Chapter, I do not care whether the Odyssey Was written by man or by woman, nor yet where the poet or poetess lived who wrote it; all I care about is the knowing as much as I can about the poem; and I believe that scholars both in England and on the continent would have helped me to fuller under standing if they had seen thelr way to doing so.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Authoress of the OdysseySamuel Butler, English author, literary historian and critic (1835-1902)This ebook presents «The Authoress of the Odyssey», from Samuel Butler. A dynamic table of contents enables to jump directly to the chapter selected.Table of Contents- About This Book- Preface- The Importance Of Inquiry- The Story Of The Odyssey- The Preponderance Of Woman In The Odyssey- Jealousy For The Honour And Dignity Of Woman- Whether Penelope Is Being Whitewashed- The Character Of Penelope, The Journey Of Telemachus- Further Indications That The Writer Is A Young, Headstrong, And Unmarried Woman- Ithaca And Scheria Are Drawn From Trapani- The Voyages Of Ulysses Shown To Be A Sail Round Sicily- Further Details Regarding The Voyages Of Ulysses- Who Was The Writer- The Date Of The Poem- Further Evidence In Support Of An Early Ionian Settlement At Trapani- That The Iliad Which The Writer Of The Odyssey Knew Was The Same As What We Now Have- Relation To Other Poems Of The Trojan Cycle And Its Development By The Authoress- Conclusion

The Authoress of the Odysseyby Samuel Butler"Today it is obvious to all but the most tradition-bound that women can achieve anything that men can. This was not so obvious in the last decade of the 19th century when Samuel Butler, a maverick classicist, proposed this unique theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman. This was, to say the least, a shocking proposal for his contemporaries. Aside from the perceived diminution of the role of 'Homer,' this was too far outside the box for most scholars. At the time Butler wrote, women couldn't vote or own property in many industrialized countries, and some female authors adopted male pseudonyms to get published. Biology was considered a limiting factor for the female sex, and historic contributions of women were ignored.Based on textual analysis, geography, history and a bit of speculation, Butler came to the conclusion that the Odyssey was a sequel written several generations after the Iliad, by a woman residing in Sicily. Some of his best evidence is simple literary criticism--Butler's observation that women in the Odyssey are much better dimensionalized than the ones in the Iliad.Although his specific theory of who wrote the Odyssey is still controversial (and probably unverifiable), today scholars are much more open to the idea of a separate authorship of the two epics. Butler's concept that the text of both epics was pieced together from pre-existing bardic material about the Trojan war is also considered an acceptable thesis. This is why this book is still read and discussed a century later, as a milestone in the history of thought about classical authorship, even though it was not completely vindicated.It may seem a minor point, but it didn't help the establishment perception of this book that Butler insisted on using Roman equivalents for Greek deities (and the principal) throughout. Specifically, Mars = Ares, Minerva = Athena, Aphrodite = Venus, Jupiter = Zeus, and Ulysses = Odysseus.

Samuel Butler (4th December 1835 – 18th June 1902) had both a father and grandfather in the church and was being groomed by his father to be a priest. However, after a first at Cambridge, he decided he wanted to be an artist. His father could not and would not consider such a thing and by mutual consent Samuel went to New Zealand to be a sheep farmer. Here he started writing which he continued on his return to London as well as taking up painting. Whilst he did have several paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy, his talent undoubtably was in his writing but the extent of which was only really apparent after his death. This was due entirely to his great work, “The Way of All Flesh” published the year after he died to tumultuous acclaim which is well illustrated by George Bernard Shaw describing it as "one of the summits of human achievement." “The Way of All Flesh” is a thinly disguised autobiographical account of his own harsh Christian upbringing as it traces the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex and his family. Along the way, it satires Victorian values and beliefs and with brilliant wit and irony offers a powerful indictment of most 19th-century institutions in England. Each generation has found that despite the book savaging Victorian hypocrisy, it still speaks to every era as ultimately the theme of young people growing up wanting a greater degree of personal freedom than their parents is very much alive and kicking in most families around the world.

In his second book on evolution Butler surveyed the contributions of the early theorists – Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck – alongside the more recent theories of Herbert Spencer, St George Mivart and Charles Darwin, attempting to present his own ideas as a continuation of the scientific history. The book dramatically concluded that Charles Darwin’s work was little more than a rehashing of Erasmus Darwin’s and Lamarck’s, combined with a denial of ‘the purposiveness or teleology inherent in evolution as first propounded’.