Erewhon by Samuel Butler

Erewhon

Author: Samuel Butler

Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. But their visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal community has its faults - here crime is treated indulgently as a malady to be cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly punished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyed after a bizarre prophecy. Can he survive in a world where morality is turned upside down? Inspired by Samuel Butler's years in colonial New Zealand and by his reading of Darwin's Origin of Species, Erewhon (1872) is a highly original, irreverent and humorous satire on conventional virtues, religious hypocrisy and the unthinking acceptance of beliefs.

The Way of All Flesh: Penguin English Library

By Samuel Butler

Written with great humour, irony and honesty, The Way of All Flesh exploded perceptions of the Victorian middle-class family in its radical depiction of Ernest Pontifex, a young man who casts off his background and discovers himself.

The awkward but likeable son of a tyrannical clergyman and a priggish mother, and destined to follow his father into the church, Ernest gleefully rejects his parents'...

Published: 25/07/2012

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9780141199153

RRP: $9.95

The Way of All Flesh

By Samuel Butler

After the restoration of King Charles II to the British throne in 1660, dramatists experienced new freedom in an age that broke from the strict morality of puritan rule and in which elegance and wit became the chief virtues. Irreverent, licentious and cynical, the three plays collected here hold up a mirror to this dazzling era and satirize the gulf between appearances and reality. In Etherege's The...

Published: 01/07/1966

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9780140430127

RRP: $24.95