Самуэль Батлер — книжные серии

Samuel Butler was among the most wide-ranging of the accomplished crew of late Victorian writers to which be belonged — a forceful controversialist in the debates that surrounded Darwin’s theory of evolution, a painter who sometimes exhibited at the Royal Academy, an idiosyncratic critic and a gifted travel writer, and even, in his early years, a highly successful sheep farmer in New Zealand. He was also, as The Way of All Flesh, his deterministic tale of the havoc wrought by genetic inheritance, suggests, one of the great British masters of the novel of ideas.

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.

В английской литературе второй половины XIX в. Самуэлю Батлеру принадлежит видное место. В жанре фантастического гротеска он возродил свифтовскую традицию, а в жанре романа воспитания предвосхитил тенденции, в полной мере развившиеся в европейской психологической прозе XX в. При создании "Пути всякой плоти" с немыслимой для того времени откровенностью писатель использовал личный жизненный опыт. Автобиографичность придает его повествованию особую остроту. В романе прослеживается формирование характера и духовное становление сына священника. Перед читателем проходят картины печального, искалеченного деспотичным произволом воспитателей детства…