Gibbon and the 'Watchmen of the Holy City': The Historian and His Reputation, 1776-1815

ISBN-13: 9780198187332 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 464 str.

David Womersley

Opis

The subject of this book is the story of the conflict between Gibbon and those he mockingly dubbed the "Watchmen of the Holy City," and it explores the ramifications of an elusive aspect of authorship. By considering the sequence of interactions between the historian and his readership, Womersley makes possible a more intimate understanding of what might be called Gibbon's experience of himself. At the same time he deepens our knowledge of the conditions of English authorship during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Recenzje

Erudite and absorbing new book ... David Womersley has written an important book; it greatly increases our sense of the ways in which Gibbon's self-fashioning went on within the pages of his major works ... Womersley has taken us where none have ventured before, in showing Gibbon as a Bowdler-like censor of his own ongoing productions.