The World of Mr Casaubon

Colin Kidd is Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews and a Fifty-Pound Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and to the Guardian, and has lectured in all parts of the British Isles, in France and in the United States.

• 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.

'Behind this excellent study of the history of mythography in Britain lies an ingenious starting point: the 'hobby horse' of George Eliot's dried-up pedant and seeker of the 'Key to All Mythologies' in Middlemarch the Revd Edward Casaubon … Colin Kidd's achievement is to have made an impressively wide-ranging and readable contribution to the immensely complex history of the subject that caught the Revd Edward Casaubon in its net.' Rosemary Ashton, The Times Literary Supplement