Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime

ISBN-13: 9780521810609 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 320 str.

Luke Gibbons

Opis

Burke's influential early writings on aesthetic are intimately connected to his political concerns according to this study of his engagement with Irish politics and culture. The heart of his aesthetic addressed itself to the experience of terror, a spectre that haunts Burke's political imagination throughout his career. Burke's preoccupation with violence, sympathy and pain actually allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment. This major reassessment of a key political and cultural figure appeals to Irish studies specialists, political theorists and Romanticists.

Recenzje

Review of the hardback: '… this dynamic pioneering account of Burk's thought puts him among the best. Where Gibbons surpasses all pre-existing studies of Burke is in his broad coverage of eighteenth-century ideas of sympathy, the sublime and aesthetics, which does justice to Burke's stature as an intellectual.' The Times Literary Supplement

Spis treści

Introduction: Edmund Burke and the colonial sublime; Part I. The Politics of Pain: 1. 'This King of Terrors'; Edmund Burke and the aesthetics of executions; 2. Philoctetes and colonial Ireland: the wounded body as national narrative; Part II. Sympathy and the Sublime; 3. The sympathetic sublime: Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and the politics of pain; 4. Did Edmund Burke cause the great Famine? Political economy and colonialism; Part III. Colonialism and Enlightenment: 5. 'Tranquillity tinged with terror': the sublime and agrarian insurgency; 6. Burke and colonialism: the enlightenment and cultural diversity; Part IV. Progress and Primitivism: 7. 'Subtilised into savages': Burke, progress and primitivism; 8. 'The return of the native': The United Irishmen, culture and colonialism.