Samuel Butler summary

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Samuel Butler, detail of an oil painting by Charles Gogin, 1896; in the National Portrait Gallery, London

Samuel Butler, (born Dec. 4, 1835, Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, Eng.—died June 18, 1902, London), British novelist, essayist, and critic. Descended from distinguished clergymen, he grappled for many years with Christianity and evolution, first embracing, then rejecting, Charles Darwin’s theories in his writings. He is best known for The Way of All Flesh (1903), his autobiographical novel that tells, with ruthless wit and lack of sentiment, the story of his escape from the suffocating moral atmosphere of his home circle. In his lifetime his reputation rested on the utopian satire Erewhon (1872), which foreshadowed the end of the Victorian illusion of eternal progress.

satire Summary

Satire, artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform. Satire is a

literary criticism Summary

Literary criticism, the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato’s cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often

novel Summary

Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an