Synopses & Reviews
Review
"An exemplary interdisciplinary work in which aesthetics, ideas, and history are mutually activating..." New Hibernia Review"This new book on Burke, by Luke Gibbons of Notre Dame University, goes a long way towards resolving the apparent contradictions in Burke's life and towards reconciling the ambiguities in his legacy...[A] bracing read and a signal achievement with much that is new to say..." Irish Times
Review
"An exemplary interdisciplinary work in which aesthetics, ideas, and history are mutually activating..." New Hibernia Review"This new book on Burke, by Luke Gibbons of Notre Dame University, goes a long way towards resolving the apparent contradictions in Burke's life and towards reconciling the ambiguities in his legacy...[A] bracing read and a signal achievement with much that is new to say..." Irish Times"Gibbons provides a cogent and nuanced account of Burke's particular contribution to theories of sensibility, as well as a compelling examination of the role of sensibility within Enlightenment thought in general and the politics of the eighteenth century, with particular attention to the colonial and assimilatory pressures within the British Isles. Edmund Burke and Ireland is essential reading for anyone grappling with the complexity of Burkean affect and, more broadly, with the stresses and strains between Englightenment thought and eighteenth-century colonial practices." - Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Julia Wright, Wilfrid Laurier University
Synopsis
This study argues that Burke's influential early writings on aesthetics are intimately connected to his politics. Burke's preoccupation with violence, sympathy and pain allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment. This reassessment of a key cultural figure will appeal to Irish studies specialists, political theorists and Romanticists.
Table of Contents
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. 'Subtilized into savages': Burke, progress and primitivism; 8. 'The return of the native': The United Irishmen, culture and colonialism.