Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith

By Michael Griffin

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1611486890
• ISBN13: 9781611486896
• Release Date: April 2015
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"