Other editions of book The Authoress of the Odyssey

The following work consists in some measure of matter already published in England and Italy during the last six years. The original publications were in the Athenœum, Jan. 30 and Feb. 20, 1892, and in the Eagle for the Lent Term, 1892, and for the October Term, 1892. Both these last two articles were re-published by Messrs. Metcalfe & Co. of Cambridge, with prefaces, in the second case of considerable length. I have also drawn from sundry letters and articles that appeared in Il Lambruschini, a journal published at Trapani and edited by Prof. Giacalone-Patti, in 1892 and succeeding years, as also from two articles that appeared in the Rassegna della Letteratura Siciliana, published at Acireale in the autumn of 1893 and of 1894, and from some articles published in the Italian Gazette (then edited by Miss Helen Zimmern) in the spring of 1895.

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.

The following work consists in some measure of matter already published in England and Italy during the last six years. The original publications were in the Athenæum, Jan. 30 and Feb. 20, 1892, and in the Eagle for the Lent Term, 1892, and for the October Term, 1892. Both these last two articles were re-published by Messrs. Metcalfe & Co. of Cambridge, with prefaces, in the second case of considerable length. I have also drawn from sundry letters and articles that appeared in Il Lambruschini, a journal published at Trapani and edited by Prof. Giacalone-Patti, in 1892 and succeeding years, as also from two articles that appeared in the Rassegna della Letteratura Siciliana, published at Acireale in the autumn of 1893 and of 1894, and from some articles published in the Italian Gazette (then edited by Miss Helen Zimmern) in the spring of 1895. Each of the publications above referred to contained some matter which did not appear in the others, and by the help of local students in Sicily, among whom I would name the late Signor E. Biaggini of Trapani, Signor Sugameli of Trapani, and Cavaliere Professore Ingroia of Calatafimi, I have been able to correct some errors and become possessed of new matter bearing on my subject. I have now entirely re-cast and re-stated the whole argument, adding much that has not appeared hitherto, and dealing for the first time fully with the question of the writer’s sex.

Samuel Butler, scholar, painter, pioneer photographer, and novelist (including 'Erewhon' and 'The Way of All Flesh'), was one of the less orthodox of Victorian intellectual provocateurs, who confronted powerful orthodoxies such as the Church, the academic establishment, and scientific Darwinism. During the last decade of his productive life (he died in 1902), his main concern became the 'Homeric question'. In his youth, he had been a classical scholar at St John's College, Cambridge; but 'The Authoress of the Odyssey' [1897] is unlike any work of mainstream Victorian classics. His theory - that the Odyssey was written by a woman and (even more startlingly) by one who configured herself in the epic as the Phaeacian princess, Nausicaa - set him on collision course with all the 'orthodoxies' of the stuffy, patriarchal establishment of 'Oxbridge' scholarship. His exposition hesitates (brilliantly, or accidentally?) in the grey area between closely reasoned argument, eccentric tomfoolery and knowing pole

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903. Both have remained in print ever since. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, Samuel Butler developed a theory that the Odyssey came from the pen of a young Sicilian woman, and that the scenes of the poem reflected the coast of Sicily and its nearby islands. He described the "evidence" for this theory in his The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and in the introduction and footnotes to his prose translation of the Odyssey (1900)

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