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

by Luke Gibbons

• ISBN13: 9780521100946
• ISBN10: 0521100941
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-05
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Edmund Burke and the colonial sublime

The Politics of Pain

'This King of Terrors'; Edmund Burke and the aesthetics of executions

Philoctetes and colonial Ireland: the wounded body as national narrative

Sympathy and the Sublime

The sympathetic sublime: Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and the politics of pain

Did Edmund Burke cause the great Famine? Political economy and colonialism

Colonialism and Enlightenment

'Tranquillity tinged with terror': the sublime and agrarian insurgency

Burke and colonialism: the enlightenment and cultural diversity

Progress and Primitivism

'Subtilized into savages': Burke, progress and primitivism

'The return of the native': The United Irishmen, culture and colonialism

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