Haunted by Erewhon

Haunted by Erewhon

Samuel Butler and Roger Robinson

$35.00

96 in stock

SKU: 978-1-0670910-2-6 Categories: , ,

Description

Haunted by Erewhon is a revelatory reimagining of the life of Samuel Butler — radical thinker, satirist, explorer and author of Erewhon, arguably the first great New Zealand book.

Drawing on fifty years of research in archives and on the ground from Canterbury to Cambridge, and extensively on Butler’s own words, Roger Robinson reconstructs the missing story of Butler’s time in New Zealand. The coherent and confessional first-person narrative brings to life the four formative years that shaped Butler’s mind, his art, and his prescient vision of the modern world.

In this boldly genre-bending ‘co-authored autobiography’ Butler speaks again in his own vivid, witty and subversive voice. We read him as abused child and emerging adult, as explorer, settler and sheep-farmer, as journalist, philosopher, lover (and cat-lover), wrestling with Darwin’s ideas, with faith and doubt, with sexuality, and haunted for life by the mountains of South Canterbury. Robinson’s discoveries — including new evidence of Butler’s relationships, inspirations and regrets — illuminate the origins of his prophetic insights into evolution, technology and colonialism.

Part revisionist biography, part literary detective story, Haunted by Erewhon restores Butler to his rightful place as an early New Zealand writer of global importance. It is an original, passionate and engrossing work of scholarship and imagination — the untold story of how a young emigrant in the 1860s created one of the world’s most visionary books.

About the author

Samuel Butler died on 18 June 1902, probably of lung cancer. He was born in England and educated at Shrewsbury School and Cambridge University. He lived in Canterbury, New Zealand, from 27 January 1860 to 15 June 1864. He became a notable explorer and successful sheep farmer in a region of the Southern Alps now renowned for its use in the Lord of the Rings movies. He then established himself as a Christchurch journalist and public intellectual. His satiric fiction Erewhon and his autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh are classics of literature in English, included in many lists of great books. Neither has ever been out of print. His rebellious Notebooks helped make him a cult figure of the early 1900s.

Roger Robinson, also born and educated in England, arrived in New Zealand in 1968 to a post at the University of Canterbury and subsequently at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the co-editor and main author of the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (Pan Classics), and has written seminal essays on Butler in Te Ara — Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and elsewhere. He is a wide-ranging literary scholar and internationally award-winning sports writer and journalist. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington and a life member of Athletics New Zealand.

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