Research Talk with Barbara Leckie, Department of English Language & Literature

This paper will discuss George Eliot’s "Middlemarch" through the lens of twentieth- and twenty-first-century procrastination self-help guides. In this novel, Edward Casaubon famously procrastinates his “great work,” “The Key to All Mythologies.” I will suggest that by looking closely at his procrastinatory methods, energies, and excuses we can gain insight into Eliot’s novel (and the nineteenth-century novel itself as a procrastinatory structure), the modern subject, and the rise of self-help literature on procrastination since the 1980s.