Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution PDF
Preview Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution
This study develops a detailed reading of the subtle and shifting interrelations between aesthetics, ideology, language, gender, and political economy in two highly influential works by Edmund Burke: his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), and the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Tom Furniss's close attention to the rhetorical labyrinths of these texts is combined with an attempt to locate them within the larger discursive networks of the period, including texts by Locke, Hume, and Smith. This process reveals that Burke's contradictions and inconsistencies are symptomatic of a strenuous engagement with the ideologi- cal problems endemic to the period. While the Enquiry develops a revolutionary aesthetic ideology which contributes towards the hegemonic struggle of the middle class in the period of the Seven Years War, the Reflections was written to contain a revolution threatening to destroy the very social formation which the Enquiry was written to promote. Yet the radical revolution can be seen to be already latent in Burke's earlier aesthetic ideology. It is this which constitutes Burke's dilemma, and which makes the Reflections an audacious compromise formation which simultaneously defends the ancien regime, con- tributes towards the articulation of radical thought, and makes possible the revolution which we call English Romanticism. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 4 EDMUND BURKE'S AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM General Editors Professor Marilyn Butler Professor James Chandler University of Cambridge University of Chicago Editorial Board John Barrell, University of Sussex Paul Hamilton, University of Southampton Mary Jacobus, Cornell University Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of Colorado This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again and again by what Wordsworth called those 'great national events' that were 'almost daily taking place': the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was a literature of enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of 'literature' and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. TITLES IN PREPARATION Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters by Mary A. Favret British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire by Nigel Leask Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution by Tom Furniss Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760-1830 by Peter Murphy Allegory in Romantic and Post-Romantic Culture by Theresa M. Kelley In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women by Julie A. Carlson Keats, Narrative and Audience by Andrew J. Bennett Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre by David Duff EDMUND BURKE'S AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY Language, gender, and political economy in revolution TOM FURNISS Lecturer in English Studies University of Strathclyde CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521418157 © Cambridge University Press 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 This digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Furniss, Tom. Edmund Burke's aesthetic ideology: language, gender, and political economy in revolution / Tom Furniss. p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in Romanticism) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 41815 1 (hardback) 1. Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797-Aesthetics. 2. Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797. Philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. 3. Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797. Reflections on the revolution in France. 4. France — History — Revolution. 1789-1799 - Historiography. 5. Great Britain - Civilization - 18th century. 6. Aesthetics. British - 18th century. 7. Romanticism - Great Britain. 8. Sublime, The. I. Title. II. Series. DA506.B9F87 1993 lll'.85'092-dc20 92-35628 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-41815-7 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-05548-2 paperback For my parents, Eric Thomas Furniss and Doreen Lily Furniss. And for Uwe Tollner.
Description:The list of books you might like
