Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ndmmz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-12T12:30:00.064Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Burke, Boredom, and the Theater of Counterrevolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Anne Mallory
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A rich critical literature explores the relation between Edmund Burke's theatrical style and his counterrevolutionary argument. Redirecting this line of inquiry, the essay treats Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as a histrionic literary performance, arguing that to appreciate its significance we must recover a neglected subtext: a preoccupation with boredom and restlessness. Burke's loyalties are divided: defending England, he counsels against extremes of torpor and excitement. He works to preserve England in a state of settled “repose,” yet his rhetoric reveals a baseline of boredom. Indulging in fantasies of reform and utopia and deploying strategies of tragic hyperbole and self-parody, he mobilizes conventional associations of boredom and revolution to negotiate a new position from which to exercise cultural authority. Textual histrionics do more than contain a revolutionary threat; they establish an alternative theater of boredom.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 118 , Issue 2 , March 2003 , pp. 224 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Baker, Keith Michael. “Revolution.” The Political Culture of the French Revolution. Ed. Lucas, Colin. Oxford: Pergamon, 1988. 41–61. Vol. 2 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. 4 vols.Google Scholar
“Bore, v.2.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.Google Scholar
Boulton, James T. The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke. London: Routledge, 1963.Google Scholar
Browne, Stephen H. Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1993.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Ed. Cobban, Alfred and Smith, Robert A. Vol. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. Hints for an Essay on the Drama. C. 1761. The Early Writings. Ed. McLoughlin, T. O. and Boulton, James T. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. 553–63.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. The Early Writings. Ed. McLoughlin, T. O. and Boulton, James T. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. 185–320.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. O'Brien, Conor Cruise. London: Penguin, 1986.Google Scholar
Burney, Frances. The Diary and Letters of Frances Burney. Ed. Woolsey, Sarah Chauncy. Vol. 1. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880.Google Scholar
Butler, Marilyn. “Telling It like a Story: The French Revolution as Narrative.” Studies in Romanticism 28 (1988): 345–64.Google Scholar
Carlson, Julie. “Command Performances: Burke, Coleridge, and Schiller's Dramatic Reflections on the Revolution in France.” Wordsworth Circle 23 (1992): 117–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, Julie. “Impositions of Form: Romantic Antitheatricalism and the Case against Particular Women.” ELH 60 (1993): 149–79.Google Scholar
De Bruyn, Frans. “Edmund Burke's Gothic Romance: The Portrait of Warren Hastings in Burke's Writings and Speeches in India.” Criticism 29 (1987): 415–38.Google Scholar
De Bruyn, Frans. The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.Google Scholar
Edgeworth, Maria. Ennui. Castle Rackrent and Ennui. Ed. Marilyn Butler. New York: Penguin, 1993. 129–323.Google Scholar
Friedman, Geraldine. The Insistence of History: Revolution in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Friedman, Geraldine. “Rereading 1798: Melancholy and Desire in the Construction of Edgeworth's Anglo-Irish Union.” European Romantic Review 10 (1999): 175–92.Google Scholar
Furniss, Tom. Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hazlitt, William. Selected Writings. Ed. Cook, Jon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Paul, Hindson, and Gray, Tim. Burke's Dramatic Theory of Politics. Aldershot: Avebury, 1988.Google Scholar
Hughes, Peter. “Originality and Allusion in the Writings of Edmund Burke.” Centrum 4 (1976): 32–43.Google Scholar
Janes, Regina. “Beheadings.” Representations 35 (1991): 21–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keane, Angela. “Reflections and Correspondences: The Unfamiliarity of Burke's Familiar Letter.” Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Ed. Whale, John. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 193–218.Google Scholar
Kramnick, Isaac. The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative. New York: Basic, 1977.Google Scholar
Lepenies, Wolf. Melancholy and Society. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Musselwhite, David. “Reflections on Burke's Reflections, 1790–1990.” The Enlightenment and Its Shadows. Ed. Hulme, Peter and Jordanova, Ludmilla. London: Routledge, 1990. 142–62.Google Scholar
O'Brien, Conor Cruise. The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Google Scholar
O'Brien, Conor Cruise. Introduction. Burke, Reflections 9–76.Google Scholar
Paine, Thomas. The Rights of Man. The Writings of Thomas Paine. Ed. Conway, Moncure Daniel. London: Routledge; Thoemmes, 1996. 258–523. Vol. 2 of Thomas Paine: Life and Works.Google Scholar
Parsons, Florence Mary. Garrick and His Circle. New York: Putnam, 1906.Google Scholar
Paulson, Ronald. Representations of Revolution. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Reid, Christopher. “Burke's Tragic Muse: Sarah Siddons and the ‘Feminization’ of the Reflections.” Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays. Ed. Blakemore, Steven. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992. 1–27.Google Scholar
Samet, Elizabeth D. “A Prosecutor and a Gentleman: Edmund Burke's Idiom of Impeachment.” ELH 68 (2001): 397–418.Google Scholar
Shklar, Judith. Foreword. Lepenies vii–xvi.Google Scholar
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Boredom: The Literary History of an Idea. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.Google Scholar
Spiegelman, Willard. Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poets and the Work of Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Stallybrass, Peter. “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat.” Representations 31 (1990): 69–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, Orrin. Fantastic Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men. 1790. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Hints. Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 1–64.Google Scholar
Wood, Neal. “The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke's Political Thought.” Journal of British Studies 4 (1964): 41–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zerilli, Linda M. G. “Text/Woman as Spectacle: Edmund Burke's ‘French Revolution.‘” Eighteenth Century 33 (1992): 47–72.Google Scholar