Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors

In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon's obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot's use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to do just that.

Roberts considers the epigraph as a mirror that refracts the meaning of a text, and that thus carries important resonances for the way Eliot's novels generate their meanings. In this ...