Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 10/16/2003
EAN 9780521810609, ISBN10: 0521810604
Hardcover, 320 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
This pioneering study of Burke's engagement with Irish politics and culture argues that Burke's influential early writings on aesthetics are intimately connected to his lifelong political concerns. The concept of the sublime, which lay at the heart of his aesthetics, addressed itself primarily to the experience of terror, and it is this spectre that haunts Burke's political imagination throughout his career. Luke Gibbons argues that this found expression in his preoccupation with political terror, whether in colonial Ireland and India, or revolutionary America and France. Burke's preoccupation with violence, sympathy and pain allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment, but from a position no less committed to the plight of the oppressed, and to political emancipation. This major reassessment of a key political and cultural figure will appeal to Irish studies and Post-Colonial specialists, political theorists and Romanticists.
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.