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.
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