Enlightenment in Ruins : The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith
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Overview
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) moved between the genres and geographies of enlightenment writing with considerable dexterity. As a consequence he has been characterized as a passive purveyor of enlightenment thought, a hack, a harried translator of the French enlightenment for an English audience, an ideological lackey, and a subtle ironist. In poetry, he is either a compliant pastoralist or an engaged social critic. Yet Goldsmith's career is as complex and as contradictory as the enlightenment currents across which he wrote, and there is in Goldsmith's oeuvre a set of themes--including his opposition to the new imperialism and to glibly declared principles of liberty--which this book addresses as a manifestation of his Irishness.
Michael Griffin places Goldsmith in two contexts: one is the intellectual and political culture in which he worked as a professional author living in London; the other is that of his nationality and his as yet unstudied Jacobite politics. Enlightenment in Ruins thereby reveals a body of work that is compellingly marked by tensions and transits between Irishness and Englishness, between poetic and professional imperatives, and between cultural and scientific spheres.This item is Non-Returnable
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781611486896
- ISBN-10: 1611486890
- Publisher: Bucknell University Press
- Publish Date: April 2015
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.7 pounds
- Page Count: 226
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