Today my short monograph Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors is published by @OpenBookPublish. It is, as its title suggests, a reading of Eliot's marvellous novel via the text's many epigraphs and embedded quotations, some of which I track-down and identify for the first time. That sounds dry I know, but I hope I make something a little more illuminating and engaged out of these readings, to do with Eliot's distinctive and powerful modes of realism, reading the mirror-like and lens-like effects of Eliot's complex allusiveness in terms of her mimesis. There are chapters on the novel's intertextualities via George Sand and Pascal, Sappho, 19th-century Science, Tolstoy and Zola, Rousseau, Homer and Sophocles, Goethe and Guizot, bits and bobs on paintings and music and bells, Brownian motion and Herodotus. I am Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture after all.
