| book details |

The Authoress of The Odyssey

By (author) Samuel Butler, Edited by Stephen Games

| on special |

normal price: R 551.95

Price: R 496.95

| add to trolley |

| book description |

The Authoress of The Odyssey is one of the most controversial booksÂ to emerge from the Humanities. The questions it raises challenge not only how we read Classical literature but how we judge flawedÂ thinkers-today's as well as those in the past. More than a century before the rise of today's Cancel Culture, author and polymath Samuel Butlerâ€”who famously predicted ArtificialÂ Intelligence while working as a sheep farmer in 1863â€”brought a radical and original intelligence to bear on Homer's epics. In the faceÂ of opposition and mockery, he concluded that the author of TheÂ Odyssey was a young womanâ€”""single and headstrong"". In The Authoress, Butler lays out his argument step by step, challenging readers with his sharp rationalism while provoking them with prejudices reflective of his culture and troubled background. Butler regarded his results as unarguable and thought equally highly of his own genius. He was not pleased, however, by where his logic had led him. What he saw as evidence of female authorship struckÂ him also as evidence of artistic inadequacy. The Authoress therefore became both a hatchet job on one of our civilisation's most revered texts and a test case in Victorian misogyny. From a distance of more than 125 years, it is easy to dismiss Butler'sÂ findings as no less distasteful than his biases. And yet, despite his flaws, The Authoress pioneered the analytical paradigm of Practical Criticism that would dominate literary inquiry at the highest level for the next half-century. In that context, The Authoress forces us to confront an urgent and topical moral dilemma now haunting academia: how do we avoid shutting down difficult ideas because we dislike their source?