Selections from Previous Works
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- General readers interested in Victorian English literature and intellectual history
- Readers who wish to sample Samuel Butler's style through short selections
- Students who need public-domain English texts for classroom excerpts or translation practice
- Those who enjoy satirical prose and essays and are accustomed to e-reading
Not a good fit for
- Researchers seeking a complete collected edition or a systematically annotated scholarly version
- Readers who want a Chinese translation and are not comfortable with the English original
- Casual readers expecting continuous long-form narrative rather than selections
Reading tips
- Begin with the table of contents to see where the selections come from, then choose pieces by interest rather than reading straight through.
- After each piece, briefly note whom the author is satirizing and how the argument is made, to gain an overall grasp.
- Read alongside general background material on nineteenth-century English society and religion.
- Use the eBook's search function to trace keywords and see how the same theme appears across different selections.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book Butler's complete works?
What level of English is needed to read this book?
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Comments
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About the author
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was a British novelist and essayist. Born into a clergyman's family in Nottinghamshire, he graduated from Cambridge University and later went to New Zealand to run a sheep station. He is known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon and the posthumously published autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh. The former uses an imaginary country as a mirror to critique Victorian education, religion, and morality, while the latter examines growth and family relations through a family narrative. He also wrote Erewhon Revisited, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey, and works on life, art, science, evolution, and memory, spanning fiction, essays, and intellectual commentary, often with an ironic and skeptical tone.
