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Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Victorian satirist, critic, and visual artist, possessed one of the most original and inquiring imaginations of his age. The author of two satires,Erewhon(1872) andThe Way of All Flesh(1903), Butler's intellectually adventurous explorations along the cultural frontiers of his time appeared in volume after eccentric volume. Author of four works on evolution, he was one of the most prolific evolutionary speculators of his time. He was an innovative travel writer and art historian who used the creative insights of his own painting, photography, and local knowledge to invent, in works likeAlps and Sanctuaries(1881), a vibrant Italian culture that contrasted with the spiritually frigid experience of his High Church upbringing. Despite his range and achievement, there remains surprisingly little contemporary analytical commentary on Butler's work.Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grainis an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age. The essays, taken together, discuss the formation of Victorian England's ultimate polymath, an artistic and intellectual ventriloquist who assumed an extraordinary range of roles - as satirist, novelist, evolutionist, natural theologian, travel writer, art historian, biographer, classicist, painter, and photographer.

An accurate and comprehensive study of the political aspects of Fielding's art has been sorely needed. As a result of decades of work by literary scholars and a series of great historians, such a study is finally possible. This volume addresses that need, and, in the light of a recent revival of interest in Fielding's work, it arrives most opportunely. The author offers here a wide-ranging focus and a firm grip on the shifting complexities of Fielding's political situations—the loyalties and enmities, factional alignments and fractious rhetoric—that allow the satisfactory understanding of Fielding's political writing. Political writing in Fielding's day, as in ours, was topical, concerned with evanescent problems and day-to-day needs that were familiar to contemporaries, but that are now recaptured only with greatest difficulty. This study constitutes a thorough reconstruction of Fielding's political context and extricates from the context Fielding's own political endeavours. Cleary's work will make many of Fielding's previously unstudied works accessible to students and scholars of eighteenth-century English literature. A necessary point of reference to both literary specialists and historians concerned with eighteenth-century England.

[...]the easily distracted Laputians could converse only if a servant constantly held their attention by \"flapping\" their mouths and ears with an inflated bladder, containing a few calculi, and fastened to a stick.

Maas discusses the use of literature in neutralizing pernicious dichotomous thinking. The genre of satire, as well as the comedy of manners, seem to have the function of attacking rigid either-or modes of thinking, and encouraging incremental adjustments toward a more rational course.