Edmund Burke and Ireland : aesthetics, politics and the colonial sublime
"The pioneering study of Edmund Burke's engagement with Irish politics and culture argues that Burke's influential early writings on aesthetics and 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 anxious aesthetics 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 postcolonial specialists, political theorists and students of Romanticism."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2003
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2003
Biographies
xiv, 304 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780521810609, 9780521100946, 0521810604, 0521100941
52286744
'This king of terrors' : Edmund Burke and the aesthetics of executions
'Philoctetes' and colonial Ireland : the wounded body as national narrative
The sympathetic sublime : Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the politics of pain
Did Edmund Burke cause the Great Famine? Commerce, culture, and colonialism
'tranquillity tinged with terror' : the sublime and agrarian insurgency
Burke and colonialism : the Enlightenment and cultural diversity
'Subtilized into savages' : Burke, progress, and primitivism
'The return of the native' : the United Irishmen, and culture, and colonialism