Erewhon (Literary Classics)

by SamuelButler (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $11.23

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $6.94

  In this privately published work (1872), written in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, English novelist, essayist, and iconoclast Samuel Butler (1835-1902) describes an imaginary visit to a topsy-turvy country called Erewhon (an anagram of nowhere ), where it is a punishable offense to be physically ill, but where criminality and immorality are looked kindly upon as treatable diseases. The English church is pilloried in the system of Musical Banks, whose currency nobody believes in but which everyone pretends to value. Universities teach courses on how to say nothing at great length, and all machines have been banned for fear that they will develop through evolution and enslave the citizens. In this and other classic works, including The Way of All Flesh, Butler delighted in attacking the complacency and hypocrisy of Victorian manners and religion.

• New

  paperback
  

  $14.85

  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.