Books by Lionel Gossman

Even in certain of Moliere's own works, in fact, the comic vision shades into something close to Romantic irony.

Although Sainte-Palaye had a surprising influence on the literature and historiography of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-in France, England, and Germany-eighteenth-century medievalism, Gossman argues, is best understood not as anticipation of things to come but as part of a complex of ideas and feelings peculiar to the Enlightenment itself.

This work tells the story of 19th century Basel, this seemingly anachronistic hybrid of commercialism and classical republicanism, and of four thinkers who retreated there: Jacob Burckhardt, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Franz Overbeck and Nietzsche. It gives an analytical biography of these figures.

One of a small number of historical texts that have become classics, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire demands and deserves the kind of attention readers habitually grant to the classics of fictional literature. In Lionel Gossman's thematic and rhetorical study of Gibbon's masterpiece, the foundation of authority is seen as the historian's chief concern.