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Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited: Two Classic Victorian Satires of Utopia, Religion, and Society
Hardcover
Mystery & ThrillerClassic FictionGeneral Fiction
ISBN13: 9781515428473
Publisher: SMK Books
Published: Apr 3 2018
Pages: 374
Weight: 1.58
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Samuel Butler's Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited are among the great satirical fictions of the Victorian age, using an imagined country to expose the absurdities of religion, morality, education, law, punishment, medicine, and social convention. First published in 1872, Erewhon follows a traveller into a strange civilisation where illness is treated as crime, crime as misfortune, machines are feared as a possible rival species, and familiar institutions are turned inside out with cool, devastating wit. Butler's invented society is not merely a comic reversal of Victorian England, but a sharp intellectual instrument for questioning the assumptions on which respectable life depends. Dover describes Erewhon as originally published in 1872 and notes its reputation as a proto-steampunk satirical novel.
In Erewhon Revisited, published in 1901, Butler returns to the same fictional world with even more pointed religious satire. The traveller Higgs discovers that his earlier escape has been transformed into a national myth, that he is now worshipped as the Sunchild, and that an organised church has grown around a distorted version of his life. The sequel deepens Butler's attack on institutional belief, social hypocrisy, and the human need to turn accidents of history into doctrine. Online Literature lists Erewhon Revisited as a 1901 work, and contemporary summaries note its focus on the rise of Sunchildism and Butler's satirical treatment of religion.
Brought together in one substantial volume, these two works show Butler at his most original: sceptical, witty, intellectually restless, and unwilling to let inherited ideas pass unexamined. For readers of classic satire, utopian and dystopian fiction, Victorian literature, philosophical fiction, and early speculative literature, Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited remains a bracingly modern pair of novels-comic in method, serious in purpose, and still uncomfortable in all the right places.
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