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Book Description: Samuel Butler, scholar, painter, pioneer photographer and novelist (author of Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh) was one of the less orthodox of Victorian intellectual provocateurs, who confronted powerful orthodoxies such as the Church, the academic establishment, and scientific Darwinism. During the last decade of his productive life his main concern became the 'Homeric question'. In his youth he had been a classical scholar at Cambridge; but this work of 1897 is unlike any work of mainstream Victorian classicism. His theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman and (even more startlingly) by one who configured herself in the epic as the Phaeacian princess, Nausicaa set him on collision course with all the 'authordoxies' of the stuffy, patriarchal establishment of 'Oxbridge' scholarship. His exposition hesitates in a grey area between closely reasoned argument, eccentric tomfoolery and knowing polemicism. The establishment never could determine whether to take it seriously or as an elaborate spoof of their own methodologies. Certainly, Butler himself never let on what his intentions were. Now, in an age when gender studies and reception theory have a compelling influence on readings of the classical world, it is appropriate to make this book available again. The issues involved are examined by Whitmarsh in a totally new introduction. Butler's work continues to challenge, provoke and amuse.

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