"I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. 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." With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth "in the bosom of a Christian family." With irony, wit and sometimes rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Way of All Flesh (Penguin Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Butler, Samuel

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Classics

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler 'The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected' 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' respectability, and chooses instead to find his own way in the world. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Penguin English Library the Way of All Flesh

Classics

Penguin Classic

The Way of All Flesh (1903) "exploded like a bomb" in Edwardian drawing rooms. Based on Samuel Butler's own life and published posthumously, it offers a scathing indictment of Victorian bourgeois values as personified in five generations of the Pontifex family. Butler's satire centers on Ernest Pontifex, an orthodox young man who suddenly sees the falseness of the rules and expectations forced on him by parents and teachers, an epiphany which leads him to renounce the moral, religious, and social values he once held.

The Way of All Flesh (The ^AWorld's Classics)

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

A scholarly edition of Hudibras by John Wilders. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Hudibras (|c OET |t Oxford English Texts)

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Very Good, Jacket spine faded. lx, 429 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.. . Includes bibliographical references and indexes.. .

Prose Observations (|c OET |t Oxford English Texts)

Clarendon Press

Hudibras: Parts 1 and 2 and Selected Other Writings (Oxford Paperback English Texts)

Contemporary

Oxford Univ. Pr.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Authoress of the Odyssey

History & Criticism

Univ of Chicago Pr

The Notebooks of Samuel Butler

Jones, Henry Festing

History

Franklin Classics

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time The Way of All Flesh is one of the time-bombs of literature," said V. S. Pritchett. "One thinks of it lying in Samuel Butler's desk for thirty years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel." Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler's death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butler's scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement." "If the house caught on fire, the Victorian novel I would rescue from the flames would be The Way of All Flesh," wrote William Maxwell in The New Yorker. "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 Way of All Flesh (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)

United States

Random House Publishing Group

Satires and Miscellaneous Poetry and Prose

Humor & Satire

Ams Pr Inc

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