Edmund Burke and Ireland

Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime
Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-521-81060-9
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 318 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 672 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gibbons, Luke

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über Autor(innen)

Gibbons, Luke
Luke Gibbons is Professor of English, and Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He has written extensively on Irish literature, the visual arts and popular culture. He is the author of Transformations in Irish Culture (1996) and The Quiet Man (2002), and co-author of Cinema and Ireland (1988).