The World of Mr Casaubon with Prof Colin Kidd

Join us in exploring the rich intellectual landscape of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain with St Andrews own Professor Colin Kidd.

Professor Kidd’s vivid, facinating new study, 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.

Colin Kidd 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. Kidd is a hugely engaging speaker and we are delighted to invite the public along to a warm, informal launch for this fantastic new work.