The Way of All Flesh - Couverture souple

Butler, Samuel

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0192829807 ISBN 13 : 9780192829801

Editeur : Oxford Paperbacks, 1993

Synopsis

The Way of All Flesh (1903) `exploded like a bomb' in Edwardian England. Based on Samuel Butler's own life and published posthumously, it indicts Victorian bourgeois values as personified in five generations of the Pontifex family. Butler's satire centres on Ernest Pontifex, an orthodox young man who suddenly sees the falseness of the rules and aspirations forced on him by parents and teachers. He renounces his past morally, religiously, and socially - with startling results. Ernest's passage through self-deception and disgrace to nonchalant, hedonistic wisdom makes this one of the most involving novels of its era. Butler's candour spoke not only to the restless Edwardians, rebelling against the nineteenth century, but also continues to enthral readers today. In his Introduction to this richly annotated edition Michael Mason points out and explains the importance of the personal and public allusions which reverberate through the novel. This book is intended for general readers, those interested in Victorian fiction, students of 19th-century English literature at 6th form, undergraduate and post-graduate level.

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was the son of a clergyman. He was educated at Shrewsbury and St John’s College Cambridge and, after a disagreement with his father about his choice of career, left England to become a sheep farmer in New Zealand, where he stayed until 1864. On his return to England, he took up residence in Clifford’s Inn where he stayed until his death. He began to study painting and worked at it for ten years, exhibiting occasionally at the Royal Academy. In 1872 he anonymously published Erewhon which was based on the letters he wrote to his father from New Zealand. This was followed by The Fair Haven, an attack on the Resurrection, making clear the religious skepticism which had turned Butler against a career in the church.

In the years that followed, Butler wrote several works attacking contemporary scientific ideas, in particular Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In 1881 he began to write books on art and travel, the first of these being Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino. Around this time, he was also experimenting with musical composition and collaborated with Festing Jones on the oratorio entitled Narcissus. An interest in Homer led him to write lively translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey and he formed the theory that these two works were written by a woman. Butler’s partly autobiographical work The Way of All Flesh was the result of many years’ labor and appeared posthumously in 1903.

Revue de presse

It is read, I believe, mostly by the young, bent on making out a case against their elders, but Butler was fifty when he stopped working on it, and no reader much under that age is likely to appreciate the full beauty of its horrors. . . . Every contemporary novelist with a developed sense of irony is probably in some measure, directly or indirectly, indebted to Butler, who had the misfortune to be a twentieth-century man born in the year 1835 --The New Yorker

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Oxford Paperbacks
• Date d'édition: 1993
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0192829807
• ISBN 13: 9780192829801
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 478
• Éditeur: Mason Michael
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible