Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;This thesis seeks to demonstrate the importance of developing new ways of reading the writings of Edmund Burke which allow us to perceive the complexities of the interplay between politics and culture in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first part of the thesis concentrates on Burke's early aesthetic treatise. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , in order to suggest that the Enquiry is itself a revolutionary text which constructs an aesthetics which promotes the social order which emerged from the revolution of 1688. The Enquiry's governing paradigms are articulated with passages from the discourses of political economy and philosophy of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century in order to demonstrate how Burke's treatise addresses itself to the crucial problems facing a bourgeois culture attempting to establish political hegemony. ;Parts II and III analyse the interrelation between the Enquiry and Reflections on the Revolution in France by suggesting that the latter attempts both to exploit and to limit possibilities opened up by the former. The contradictions of this project are most clearly exposed through an extended analysis of Burke's representation of the events at Versailles on 5-6 October 1789, and through tracing the paradigms and dislocations which structure the discourse in Reflections on language, gender, economics, and political representation. ;The relation between text and history--especially in conditions of revolutionary crisis--is considered throughout in terms drawn from recent post-structuralist thought; in this way, Burke's texts are seen as participating within discursive projects crucial to a specific historical and socio-economic moment. To read Edmund Burke's 'revolution' in this way is understand how his texts set the terms both for radicalism and for Romanticism. It is also to underline how post-structuralist ways of reading allow specific insights into politics and history even as they transform our concepts of them