Casaubon's mythography and allegorical method -- bibliographical materials -- bibliographical materials

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 44 to Chapter 6 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

See Eliot's review of R. W. Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect (Essays, p. 36), and W. J. Harvey, "The Intellectual Background of the Novel: Casaubon and Lydgate," in Hardy, ed., Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel, pp. 33-34. Harvey notes that although Casaubon's mythography is not strictly speaking an allegorical method, its basic affinities are nevertheless with "the Renaissance approach . . . [which] reconciles pagan fable to Christianity by allegory." See also Wiesenfarth, George Eliot's Mythmaking, pp. 205-06.

Last modified 20 September 2000