Textual republic: Edward Gibbon and the problem of historical narrative in the Enlightenment

Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire shows a mastery of both narrative presentation and an enormous range of scholarly materials. But the many commentators on the work have tended to focus on these two aspects separately rather than in relationship to each other. Literary studies, moreover, have inclined to discuss the narrative in terms of neo-classical unity. This dissertation will show that no analysis of the narrative is complete without an understanding of how it interacts with the amazingly complex footnotes where Gibbon's scholarship is most in evidence. And it will maintain that, despite the deep influence of neo-classical genres and decorum on Gibbon's writing, the overall structure is deliberately multiform, and that the footnotes interrupt and even contradict the narrative.; Chapter One will argue that of the two political options available in the eighteenth century, Gibbon prefers the Polybian republic, as reformulated by Montesquieu, to the imposed unity of royal absolutism. His preference leads him to decry the centralization of power in ancient Rome in favor of the variety of nations in contemporary Europe. Among the groups opposing imperial unity are those historians who perceive unconstrained power as uncongenial to objective scholarship as the distribution of political responsibility is favorable. Chapter Two extends the opposition of scholar and emperor into the realm of literary genre. Absolutism prefers history presented in the forms of epic and romance used to reaffirm royal power; historical scholarship resists the subordination of hard-won facts to the demands of narrative propriety. During the Enlightenment, non-narrative forms such as taxonomy and alphabetization arise, not only as ways of presenting facts but also as rhetorical devices for undermining absolutist genres. Chapter Three applies the opposition of emperor and scholar to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon models his narrative on epic and romance, but adapts taxonomical rhetoric to his enormous footnote apparatus in order to contest narrative distortions of fact. The resulting divisions within the work are more akin to the Polybian separation of ranks than to imperial unity.