Womersley examines Gibbon's conflict with his critics, in particular the spokesmen for religious orthodoxy. By considering the sequence of interactions between the historian and his readership, he illuminates what might be called Gibbon's experience of himself, at the same time deepening our understanding of the conditions of English authorship during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This definitive "Companion" provides a critical overview of literary culture in the period from John Milton to William Blake. Its broad chronological range responds to recent reshapings of the canon and identifies new directions of study.

The "Companion" is composed of over fifty contributions from leading scholars in the field, its essays offer students a comprehensive and accessible survey of the field from a wide range of perspectives. It also, however, gives researchers and faculty the opportunity to update their acquaintance with new critical and scholarly work.

The volume meets the needs of an intellectual world increasingly given over to inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary study by covering philosophical, political, cultural and historical writing, as well as literary writing. Unlike other similar volumes, the main body of the "Companion" consists of readings of individual texts, both those commonly and less commonly studied.

"It was at Rome on the 15th October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started in my mind." This is the description by Gibbon of the work that was to occupy him for over 20 years. At a time when the materials for this history were scant, Gibbon's was able to absorb everything known on the subject and dominate it with his historical erudition and literary style. This six-volume boxed set reprints the third edition, complete with improved layout, textual revisions and additional footnotes.

Written by some of today's premiere scholars of American history, Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century examines some of the central themes and ideologies central to the formation of the United States including: David Womersley's introduction includes a discussion of Edmund Burke's theories on property rights and government, setting the foundation for the various themes of liberty found in this volume. In 'Of Liberty and the Colonies: A Case Study of Constitutional Conflict in the Mid-Eighteenth Century British American Empire', Jack Greene examines other forms of government and uses those examples to argue that the founding was not the conservative process that many have previously supported. Robert Ferguson explores the roles of law and religion in the formation of a free and liberal society in 'The Dialectic of Liberty: Law and Religion in Revolutionary America'. In 'Religious Conscience and Original Sin: An Exploration of America's Protestant Foundations', Barry Shain supports Ferguson's contention that religion had a profound impact on the outlook of the colonists. John Danford, in 'Riches Valuable at All Times and to All Men: Hume and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Commerce and Liberty', examines the spiritual context of the Founders in regard to the Enlightenment, arguing that the Founders preferred known ways of governance and economics to untried and untested theory. 'Moral Sense Theory and the Appeal to Natural Rights in the American Founding' by R G Frey suggests that there are conflicting viewpoints between moral sense theory and the idea of natural rights in the founding period. David Wootton presents an opposing view of the Founders in 'Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: Checks and Balances and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism'. He suggests that the ideas formed in the Enlightenment were seized upon by the Founders and that the result was a much more progressive system than could have been predicted. 'In Scottish Thought and the American Revolution: Adam Ferguson's Response to Richard Price', Ronald Hamowy discusses the consequences of the colonial conflict and pays tribute to the intellectual force of American affairs. Lance Banning examines the divisions in thought among the revolutionaries regarding the nature of liberty and the manner in which liberty was to be preserved in 'Federalism, Constitutionalism, and Republican Liberty: The First Constructions of the Constitution'. In 'Is There a James Madison Problem?', Gordon Wood presents the disparity in Madison's political thought from the 1780s to the 1790s. 'Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century' provides an examination of various facets of the Founders' lives and thoughts, as well as their times, to help readers understand the events that went into their country's creation.

Gulliver's Travels is one of the few works of English literature which is also a landmark in world literature. Jonathan Swift's account of Lemuel Gulliver's adventures in the fantastical societies of 'remote nations' was an instant best-seller on publication in 1726 and has remained in the public imagination ever since, as both a satiric fantasy and an analysis of the human condition. This scholarly edition offers an authoritative text, based on the widest possible historical collation of the many editions published in Swift's lifetime; a detailed introduction and textual apparatus; and appendices and illustrations presenting important ancillary material with new clarity. Extensive notes and commentary open out the many layers of meaning and allusion in the text, identify new sources and parallels and offer wide-ranging historical background information. An important addition to the Cambridge Swift Edition, this volume will be indispensable for scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature and ideas.

‘Instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long’

Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire compresses thirteen turbulent centuries into an epic narrative shot through with insight, irony and incisive character analysis. Sceptical about Christianity, sympathetic to the barbarian invaders and the Byzantine Empire, constantly aware of how political leaders often achieve the exact opposite of what they intend, Gibbon was both alert to the broad pattern of events and significant revealing details. The first of its six volumes, published in 1776, was attacked for its enlightened views on politics, sexuality and religion, yet it was an immediate bestseller and widely acclaimed for the elegance of its prose. Gripping, powerfully intelligent and wonderfully entertaining, it is among the greatest works of history in the English language and a literary masterpiece of its age.

This abridgement is based on David Womersley’s definitive three-volume Penguin Classics edition of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Complete chapters from each volume, linked by extended bridging passages, vividly capture the style, argument and structure of the whole work.

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed 'certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred'.
How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth-century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a consequence of that demand for a usable national past created by the high political developments of the 1530s.
Divinity and State explores the consequences of these events in the English historiography and historical drama of the sixteenth century. It is divided into four parts. In the first, the impact of reformed religion on narratives of the national past is measured and described. Part II examines how the entanglement of the national past and reformed religion was reflected in historical drama from Bale to the early years of James I, and focuses on two paradigmatic characters: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Part III considers Shakespeare's history plays in the light of the preceding discussion, and finds that Shakespeare's career as a historical dramatist shows him eventually re-shaping the history play with great audacity. Part IV corroborates this reading of Shakespeare's later history plays by reference to the dramatic ripostes they provoked.

Gulliver's Travels is one of the few works of English literature which is also a landmark in world literature. Jonathan Swift's account of Lemuel Gulliver's adventures in the fantastical societies of 'remote nations' was an instant best-seller on publication in 1726 and has remained in the public imagination ever since, as both a satiric fantasy and an analysis of the human condition. This scholarly edition offers an authoritative text, based on the widest possible historical collation of the many editions published in Swift's lifetime; a detailed introduction and textual apparatus; and appendices and illustrations presenting important ancillary material with new clarity. Extensive notes and commentary open out the many layers of meaning and allusion in the text, identify new sources and parallels and offer wide-ranging historical background information. An important addition to the Cambridge Swift Edition, this volume will be indispensable for scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature and ideas.

David Womersley's book investigates Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as both a work of literature and a work of history, examining its style and irony, tracing its classical and French sources, and highlighting the importance of its composition in three instalments over a period of twenty years. Dr Womersley discusses each of these instalments in detail, plotting the work's transformation from conception to completion, and relating this to the achievements and limitations of the philosophic historiography which Gibbon inherited from Montesquieu and Hume, but finally discarded. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire emerges from this study as a work more flexible in its sympathies and surprising in its judgements than has hitherto been granted, while the magnitude of Gibbon's achievement as a stylist, historian and thinker is brought into sharper focus.

A classic of modern aesthetics, the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful remains both influential and engaging.

From the awesome thrill of the sublime to the delightful perfection of the beautiful, Edmund Burke (1729–97) gives an involving account of our sensory, imaginative and judgemental process and its relation to artistic pleasure. This edition also includes several of Burke’s early political works which illustrate that, despite his later opposition to the Revolution in France, he took a liberal and humane view of society and government.

This authoritative edition has securely established texts and, in his illuminating introduction, David Womersley clearly reveals the cross-pollination of Burke’s aesthetic and political thinking: the power exercised by art and the art of exercising power.

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND APPENDICES BY DAVID WOMERSLEY Although it covers no less than thirteen centuries of history, writes David Womersley, Gibbon's Decline and Fall 'is never routine, always alert with humanity and intelligence, often surprising in its sympathies'. It counts, quite simply, as 'one of the greatest narratives in European literature'. This definitive three-volume edition presents a complete and unmodernized text, the author's own comments and notes, and his famous Vindication. The first volume considers the extent and constitution of the empire under the Antonines and then takes events down to the end of the fourth century. It includes the controversial chapters on the early Church and examines in detail the reign of the first Christian and last pagan emperors, Constantine and Julian.

In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality, in a biography to which we owe much of our knowledge of the man himself. Through a series of richly detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure, vigorously engaging and fencing with great contemporaries such as Garrick, Goldsmith, Burney and Burke, and of course with Boswell himself. Yet anxieties and obsessions also darkened Johnson's private hours, and Boswell's attentiveness to every facet of Johnson's character makes this biography as moving as it is entertaining. In this entirely new and unabridged edition, David Womersley's introduction examines the motives behind Boswell's work, and the differences between the two men that drew them to each other. It also contains chronologies of Boswell and Johnson, appendices and comprehensive indexes, including biographical details.

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND APPENDICES BY DAVID WOMERSLEY Although it covers no less than thirteen centuries of history, writes David Womersley, Gibbon's Decline and Fall 'is never routine, always alert with humanity and intelligence, often surprising in its sympathies'. It counts, quite simply, as 'one of the greatest narratives in European literature'. This definitive three-volume edition presents a complete and unmodernized text, the author's own comments and notes, and his famous Vindication. The second volume reveals how waves of barbarian invaders, under commanders such as Alaric and Attila, overran and eventually destroyed the west. Later sections look further east, where even the legislative and administrative achievements of Justinian and the campaigns of Belisarius could not conceal the fundamental weaknesses of the Byzantine state.

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND APPENDICES BY DAVID WOMERSLEY Although it covers no less than thirteen centuries of history, writes David Womersley, Gibbon's Decline and Fall 'is never routine, always alert with humanity and intelligence, often surprising in its sympathies'. It counts, quite simply, as 'one of the greatest narratives in European literature'. This definitive three-volume edition presents a complete and unmodernized text, the author's own comments and notes, and his famous Vindication. The third volume examines the enfeebled state of the Byzantine empire and the spread of Islam. Later sections consider the fierce clash of religions in the Crusades and to conclude this great work, Gibbon offers an overview of the mediaeval papacy and a history of Rome up until the seventeenth century.

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition enables students to study Johnson's work in the order in which it was written, and, wherever possible, using the text of the first published version. The volume presents a selection of Johnson's most important writings, drawn from all periods of his life. It reflects almost completely the range of literary forms in which Johnson wrote, including poetic translation, biographical sketches, literary criticism, and letters. It includes a broad selection from The Rambler (17501752) and The Idler (17581760), along with the travel narrative A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), and a selection from The Lives of the Poets (1781). David Womersleys introduction explores how Johnsons mastery of style enabled him to adopt various personae, sometimes simultaneously, in order to communicate through many different genres and registers. Johnson is shown to be an active participant in the philosophical and social currents of his time. This selection reveals an author driven by deeply-held principles, concerned with how the ethical, political, and affective dimensions of language go beyond vocabulary and reach into the lives of its users. Explanatory notes and commentary are included to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life of Johnson, and a Chronology.

‘There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which reproach, hatred and opposition are names of happiness’

With his wit, eloquence and shrewd perception of contemporary morals, Samuel Johnson was the most versatile of Augustan writers. His dictionary, dramas and poetry established his reputation, but it was the essays published in The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler that demonstrated the range of his talent. Tackling ethical questions such as the importance of self-knowledge, awareness of mortality, the role of the novel, and, in a lighter vein, marriage, sleep and deceit, these brilliant and thought-provoking essays are a mirror of the time in which they were written and a testament to Johnson’s stature as the leading man of letters of his age.

This new edition contains a broad selection of essays presenting both the forcefully argued moral pieces of Johnson’s middle years and the more light-hearted essays of his later work. The introduction places the works in their historical and literary context, and there is also a chronology of Johnson’s life and times.

The Samuel Johnson volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers a generous selection of Johnson's most important writings, drawn from all periods of his life. It reflects almost completely the range of literary forms in which Johnson wrote. In keeping with the the approach of the series, the texts are presented in chronological order and the text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the first published version. As well as an expansive introduction and a detailed chronology of Johnson's life, David Womersley provides helpful annotation to guide and orient the reader.