Luke Gibbons. Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime.(Book review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-05

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University

Luke Gibbons. Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 304. $65.00.

Edmund Burke and Ireland joins a mounting collection of recent works on British colonialism, on Ireland, and on the political resonance of Burke's aesthetics. Gibbons' distinctive contribution triangulates these topics in order to lay a course through Burke's career that will bring the arch-conservative of Reflections on the Revolution in France closer to today's critics of colonialism and of the Enlightenment rationale for empire. Admittedly "read[ing] against the grain" of Burke's political philosophy, Gibbons seeks roads less traveled in order more effectively "to integrate [Burke's] powerful aesthetic writings into his wider moral and political vision" (15). In doing so, he expects to reveal "a man deeply divided against himself" (xi). Although Burke sometimes disappears behind the various components in Gibbons' widely reticulating argument, he finally re-emerges, an avatar of suffering Ireland.

After a summary introductory chapter, Gibbons uses chapter i to lay the groundwork of his argument in a contextualized interpretation of Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Dovetailing with other scholars who have connected the Enquiry with Burke's later writings on India (Uday Singh Mehta, Sara Suleri) and on the French Revolution (Tom Furniss), Gibbons finds in the sublime "a fraught, highly mediated response to the turbulent colonial landscape of eighteenth-century Ireland" (23). He begins the chapter with general allusions to the execution of Fr. Nicholas Sheehy during the agrarian agitation of the Whiteboy movement in the 1760s. This agitation and the government's brutal response alarmed and horrified Burke (as we know from his private letters), and they involved the Nagles and the Hennessys, maternal relatives and early friends of Burke's family. Although these dramatic events during Burke's adulthood post-dated the Enquiry, Gibbons not only analogizes Burke's emotional reaction to his later description of sublime horror, but also argues that Burke's Enquiry owes much to the Irish context in which he grew up and in which he began (in the 1740s) to develop his aesthetic theories.

Citing views on tragedy that Burke conceived for The Reformer (1748) and developed in the Enquiry (2757), Gibbons explains the aesthetic-political nexus in Burke's reaction to the lurid theatrical spectacle of the Irish executions consequent on the Whiteboy movement, a display which he considered excessive....

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.