EDWARD GIBBON'S NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES: THE STRUCTURES OF 'THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE' (EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY)

Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a masterpiece of narration and an enduring work of historical vision and scholarship. Inquiries are abundant into its fidelity or infidelity to fact, its prevailing themes and idea of history, its epic proportions, its oratorical language and intricate irony, but not into its features and techniques of narration until after 1960. This dissertation contributes to further knowledge of the variety of structures by which Gibbon organizes the facts of the History, and it opens directions for further inquiry.; In his Memoirs Gibbon says that originally the shape and extent of the work was "dark and doubtful." His creation of a suitable form to explore this darkness of history is the subject of the first chapter. To illuminate both smaller chronological events and the massive changes taking place over thirteen-hundred years, he constructs three distinct types of chapters, which he uses throughout the History. Chapter two analyzes his achievement of thematic control over his seventy-one chapters through architectural metaphors and through precise placement of two major thematic emphases in the history--"the triumph of barbarism and religion." Chapter three examines the narrative units within Gibbon's chapters, using Volumes I, III, and VI. Particular types of paragraphs, essays, anecdotes, extended comparisons, and juxtapositions recur throughout, but the combinations are continuously novel, adapted to the requirements of each volume. Chapter four discusses the interior structure of chapter 31 in terms of the relationships implied by Gibbon's organization of smaller narrative units. Rome falls at the midpoint of the chapter; the arrangement of events suggests a rhetorical structure approximating that of the compound sentence Gibbon favors. Chapter five analyzes the organization of nations, time, and space in Volumes V and VI. The techniques developed earlier are still evident, though used differently. The last chapter reviews the reactions to the History over two centuries and the changes in critical perception and approach. The several levels of narrative structures in this study are reviewed with reference to the work still to be done.