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  • The Circulation Of Genres In Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire
  • Peter Cosgrove

I

The narrative model is the simplest way to approach the open boundary between history and fiction, but it is important to avoid the assumption that narrative remains constant. While fiction and history do tend to share many features of composition, these vary significantly from epoch to epoch: the paradigm of the realist novel, for example, which today has almost displaced any other narrative model will have limited value for periods before the novel achieved its present status. Michael McKeon’s view of the eighteenth-century novel as a product of the complex dialectic between the genres of realism and romance suggests a more useful method of understanding fictional composition at this period. “The origins of the English novel,” says McKeon, “entail the positing of a ‘new’ generic category as a dialectical negation of a ‘traditional’ dominance—the romance, the aristocracy—whose character still saturates, as an antithetical but formative force, the texture of the category by which it is being both constituted and replaced.” 1 Yet, while McKeon shows how importantly the debate over historiographical method figures in the construction of the novel, the limits of his inquiry do not permit him to test his insights into the novel against any major historical narrative. The following study, therefore, attempts to apply some features of his analysis to the study of extra-historical genres in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This work is a particularly valuable object of study since it has always seemed to fall between paradigms: epistemologically speaking, celebrated for its commitment to the methods of modern scholarship, and formally speaking, repeatedly characterized in terms of the older representational modes, epic and rhetoric. These two alternative models have proven unsatisfactory because of their sweeping generality and tendency to conflict with each other. However, Leo Braudy’s careful analogy of Gibbon’s narrator with Fielding’s in Tom Jones points the way to a further level of analysis. 2 Due to the mock-heroic format redolent of the aristocratic romance plot (Gibbon himself saw the book as a romance), Tom Jones has been [End Page 109] notoriously difficult to fit into the paradigm of formal realism. On the heels of the possibility, therefore, that Gibbon responded to the romance and the mock-heroic in Fielding, I should like to consider the intrusion of literary genres in the Decline and Fall by analyzing two overt references to mock-heroic poetry as examples of the boundary crossing between thematic and structural elements in Gibbon’s work. In demonstrating the influence of genres other than the novel, especially poetic genres already themselves in parodic motion, on a work of history, I hope not only to extend our awareness of the circulation of literary forms with respect to each other, but, in addition, to extend the range of possible generic models for history-writing itself.

It is well substantiated that the eighteenth century is a period of generic instability in literature. The traditional narrative genres of the epic and the romance, despite the high esteem in which literary criticism held them, were not attempted by any major poet after Milton except in such translations as Pope’s Homer and Dryden’s Virgil. 3 What appeared in their place were parodic forms like the mock-heroic and the burlesque, essentially species of imitation. The mock heroic as a genre, however, raises certain difficult implications for the neoclassical principles prevailing at the time. While it appeared to reaffirm, in Ulrich Broich’s words, “the values of neoclassical decorum and unity, in fact it tended to question and even undermine those norms.” Part of the reason for this effect, one not necessarily intended by practitioners of the form, was the importation of characters and situations from contemporary events and comic genres into the epic vehicle, creating what Broich calls “a polyphonic genre where different discourses clash with each other.” 4 In times of generic limit testing such as our own, the fluidity of forms is a commonplace, but in the neoclassic period when the rigid stratification of form and content was tied to the hierarchical...

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