The World of Mr Casaubon
Britain's Wars of Mythography, 1700–1870

This book explores the intellectual contexts for Mr Casaubon, a central character in George Eliot's classic and much-loved novel Middlemarch.

Colin Kidd (Author)

9781107027718, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 October 2016

248 pages
23.4 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.49 kg

'The World of Mr Casaubon is an important insight into an early modern and nineteenth-century intellectual tradition - and a valuable explanation of why Eliot wished to give this tradition such a bruising.' Richard Fallon, The British Society for Literature and Science

The World of Mr Casaubon takes as its point of departure a fictional character - Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's classic novel, Middlemarch. The author of an unfinished 'Key to All Mythologies', Casaubon has become an icon of obscurantism, irrelevance and futility. Crossing conventional disciplinary boundaries, Colin Kidd excavates Casaubon's hinterland, and illuminates the fierce ideological war which raged over the use of pagan myths to defend Christianity from the existential threat posed by radical Enlightenment criticism. Notwithstanding Eliot's portrayal of Casaubon, Anglican mythographers were far from unworldly, and actively rebutted the radical freethinking associated with the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Orientalism was a major theatre in this ideological conflict, and mythography also played an indirect but influential role in framing the new science of anthropology. The World of Mr Casaubon is rich in interdisciplinary twists and ironies, and paints a vivid picture of the intellectual world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

1. Prologue: Casaubon's dubious bequest
2. The key to all mythologies
3. The legacies of the ancients in Enlightenment mythography
4. The obsessions of Jacob Bryant: Arkite idolatry and the quest for Troy
5. The dispute of the Orient: Anglo-French rivalries in an Age of Revolution
6. Fish-gods, floods and serpent-worship: from apologetics to anthropology
7. Epilogue: the keys to all mythology in 1872.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], Folklore, myths & legends [JFHF], History of ideas [JFCX], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1], European history [HBJD], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literature & literary studies [D]