Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 provided by Syndetics

• 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

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Gibbons (Univ. of Notre Dame) establishes the connection, hitherto oblique, between Burke's aesthetics and his politics, whereby he invested the sublime with a dimension of terror and horror that had its origins in political realities. Gibbons stresses the convergence of the two, occasioned by agrarian and sectarian unrest in southern Ireland, precipitating a personal crisis for Burke because of his position as a government official and his family connection with those implicated. Whether in Ireland, India, or America, Burke was critical of the state's abuse of power and its violation of cultural and group rights, a criticism based on the aesthetic of the wounded body. He advocated intervention, not detachment, for those who were the victims of progress, and in this, his upbringing among Irish Catholics and his espousal of the Catholic cause were formative. In an Irish context, Gibbons assumes the universal application of the penal laws over time and place, does not take account of regional patterns of Catholic landholding, and assumes too readily that the landed class was uniformly Protestant and therefore arbitrary. This is an important study for assessments of the influence of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, colonialism, aesthetics, and Irish studies. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. T. P. Power Trinity and Wycliffe Colleges, University of Toronto