Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities

Description

Edmund Burke (c.1729-1797), orator, philosophical and political writer, British statesman, and opponent of the revolution in France, is among the most famous of eighteenth century Irishmen.  Two centuries after his death, however, his legacy is still contested, both in Ireland and abroad.  This is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on Burke’s complex relationship to his native Ireland.  The book brings together thirteen authors, both established experts and young scholars, from a wide variety of viewpoints and disciplines.  The contributors discuss Burke’s early years in the Blackwater Valley and in Ballitore, his experiences at the University of Dublin and as a Dublin journalist, his relationship to Irish history and aesthetics, his friendship with fellow Irishman Oliver Goldsmith, his numerous Irish links after he began his parliamentary career, his views on Irish politics and the Irish constitution, his thoughts on Ireland and India, the idea of union and political economy, religion and the Irish reception to his anti-revolutionary writings.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ~ Séan Patrick Donlan
2. ‘To Love the Little Platoon’: Edmund Burke’s Jacobite Heritage ~ Katherine O’Donnell
3. Speaking from behind the Scenes: Edmund Burke and the Lucasians, 1748-49 ~ Helen Burke
4. Edmund Burke and Trinity College: Lifetime Ties and Later College Commemoration ~ L.M. Cullen
5. Burke’s Irish Connections in England ~ Elizabeth Lambert
6. The ‘genuine voice of its records and monuments’? Edmund Burke’s ‘interior history of Ireland’ ~ Séan Patrick Donlan
7. Burke and the Irish Constitution ~ Eamon O’Flaherty
8. Burke, Goldsmith and the Irish Absentees ~ Michael J. Griffin
9. Edmund Burke’s Anglo-Irish Double Vision in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents ~ Nathan Wallace
10. Burke, Ireland and India: Reason, Rhetoric and Empire ~ F.P. Lock
11. Burke, Ireland and the Counter-revolution, 1791-1801 ~ Tadgh O’Sullivan
12. Thomas Hussey, Edmund Burke and the Irish Directory ~ Dáire Keogh
13. The National Identity of Edmund Burke ~ Michael Brown
14. Edmund Burke, Yeats and Leo Frobenius: ‘The State a tree’? W.J. McCormack

About the Editor

Séan Patrick Donlan lectures in law at the University of Limerick. He had edited a reprint of Francis Stoughtan Sullivan, Lectures on the Constitution and Laws of England (2nd end, 1776) and has published numerous articles on law, history and on Burke. He is currently researching the study of law in the late eighteenth century.