Epic history and the novel: Gibbon, Ruskin, Adams, and the decline and fall of country-house civilization

This dissertation offers an epic interpretation of a series of grand narrative histories of the rise and fall of empire. It explores how epic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to constitute a highly self-conscious tradition which directly challenged the dominance of the novel for the privileged task of representing society, the possibilities open to it, and the range of solutions for its various ills. The three narratives that I choose as most richly representative of this epic historical tradition are, first, its great foundation text, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and then two of that history's exemplary Victorian heirs, John Ruskin's Stones of Venice and Henry Adams's History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. My readings of these histories not only demonstrate the highly developed genealogical self-consciousness of this tradition, but--by showing the extent of its indebtedness to and reworking of Vergilian neoclassical epic--they question the validity of standard literary histories of the epic's rapid defeat by the new and rising novel.;By extending the literary contrast of the epic and the novel, later chapters move away from the opening emphasis upon formalist and intertextual approaches to a more historicist concern for the political and economic significance of epic history. I argue that a defense of an aristocratic politics and a landed economy--together symbolized by the cultural ideal of the country house--served as the golden age ideology subtending the formal dynamic of this hybrid form. The concluding chapters, therefore, seek to contrast epic history's declinist vision with the progressive, urban, and capitalist paradigm offered by political economy as that rival tradition is represented by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J. S. Mill, Alfred Marshall, and John Maynard Keynes.;Thus the dissertation moves from Gibbon's confident epic celebration of England's seemingly triumphant rentier aristocracy to Ruskin's anxious prophecies of doom for such an idle elite and of disaster for the overly industrialized, urbanized, and democratized system replacing it, and, finally, it concludes with Henry Adams's lament for the tragic failure of America's attempt to realize Gibbon's Enlightenment ideal. Adams, as a consciously Gibbonian historian, describes the decline and fall of the aristocratic and agrarian Jeffersonian ideal before the historical advance of an urban, industrial, capitalist, and democratic state. In his epic history, Adams reverses Gibbon's optimism, realizes Ruskin's fears, and brings the epic historical tradition to its logical close.