A complete edition of Gibbon's 'Essai', with original footnotes, variants and unpublished chapter, a contextual introduction and a commentary on each chapter.

What happens when we re-read a familiar book? Does the second encounter turn us into experts, more knowing and confident in our relation to the text? Or conversely, does it expose the gaps and limits of each reading experience? Does re-reading affirm our own sense of identity, reconnecting us to earlier memories, or does it shock and destabilize, revealing discontinuities between past and present selves? Is re-reading uncanny, a discovery of the familiar in the unfamiliar, or the reverse? Do certain literary devices and tropes – symbols, allegories, for example, depend on re-reading to be activated? Are there some texts that can only be re-read? Re-reading is rarely discussed in depth yet it forms the core of most conversations about literature, for we rarely become passionate or critical about books we have only read once. It is also re-reading that consolidates a core of texts into what we recognise to be a canon of literature, and it is re-reading, again, that breaks open the canon and reshapes it. We re-read alone, but we also re-read communally, in the shared space of the theatre, or in the translation of a text from one culture to another, or one medium to another. Re-reading is a necessary part of the professional reader’s life yet there is often, in the history of the individual scholar, some formative relationship with a text read obsessively in childhood. This bilingual volume of essays brings together an international group of eminent scholars in order to reflect on this process of re-reading, in honour of Graham Falconer, Professor of 19th century French literature, and long-term re-reader. The essays vary from personal reflections on formative childhood reading, and self-reflexive scholarly re-readings, to analysis of the theme of re-reading in texts, and presentation of new theories of re-reading. Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Eugène Fromentin, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, W. B. Yeats, William Blake, Roland Petit, H. G. Wells and Anthony Hope are amongst the authors re-visited in these reflections on the practice of re-reading.

'Barbarism and Religion' - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the notion of any one 'Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. In this first volume, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, John Pocock follows Gibbon through his youthful exile in Switzerland and his criticisms of the Encyclopédie, and traces the growth of his historical interests down to the conception of the Decline and Fall itself.

This volume, the third in the series, discusses the works of 11 British 18th-century writers, providing information on the nature of the MS, date, variant title(s), state of completion, provenance and location, date and first form of publication, any scholarly use of the MS, and the existence of any published facsimiles. Information is drawn from material in libraries, record offices and private collections throughout the world. The listing of each author's manuscripts is preceded by an introduction. The book records many hitherto unrecorded manuscripts.

Ivan Jablonka’s History Is a Contemporary Literature offers highly innovative perspectives on the writing of history, the relationship between literature and the social sciences, and the way that both social-scientific inquiry and literary explorations contribute to our understanding of the world. Jablonka argues that the act and art of writing, far from being an afterthought in the social sciences, should play a vital role in the production of knowledge in all stages of the researcher’s work and embody or even constitute the understanding obtained. History (along with sociology and anthropology) can, he contends, achieve both greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary experience through a broad spectrum of narrative modes. Challenging scholars to adopt investigative, testimonial, and other experimental writing techniques as a way of creating and sharing knowledge, Jablonka envisions a social science literature that will inspire readers to become actively engaged in understanding their own pasts and to relate their histories to the present day. Lamenting the specialization that has isolated the academy from the rest of society, History Is a Contemporary Literature aims to bring imagination and audacity into the practice of scholarship, drawing on the techniques of literature to strengthen the methods of the social sciences.