“I am the enfant terrible of literature and science”, Samuel Butler wrote in the 1890s, during the heyday of his fame among contemporaries (1912, p. 183). “If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them” (ibid.). By thus fashioning himself as both an eccentric and an iconoclast with regard to the Victorian intellectual establishment, Butler accurately outlined his future reputation at least within the literary world. Apart from his biography itself, and despite his notable contributions to evolutionary theory, art history, bible studies, and literary scholarship, this reputation rests mainly on two of his books, only the first of which he probably had in mind at the…
2581 words
Citation: Glitz, Rudolph. "Samuel Butler". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 September 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=674, accessed 21 November 2024.]
