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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith

Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith

Griffin, Michael

Hardcover

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

Literary FiguresLiterary CriticismIrish History

ISBN10: 1611485053
ISBN13: 9781611485059
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: Aug 15 2013
Pages: 226
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

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.

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