Culture, Reconciliation, and Identity in Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, and Edward Dowden

This dissertation traces the language of reconciliation through the cultural theory and political philosophy of three major English and Irish thinkers: Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, and Edward Dowden. The project arises from several preliminary questions. First: what importance do Edmund Burke's writings have for Victorian literary Unionists such as Arnold and Dowden? Second: how do Arnold and Dowden's Unionist appropriations of Burke inform their literary criticism of English poetry? Third: how and why does the language of reconciliation bridge the gap between the supposedly separate spheres of literary and political thought?

I analyze my subject authors' patterns of allusion – to figures ranging from St. Paul, Cicero, Homer, and Isaiah to Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth – for political subtexts. This allows me to move from describing the ideology of the aesthetic in the broadest theoretical sense, to describing the political concerns informing specific critical texts. This approach also allows me to read Burke's Cicero as a persona for reconciling Irish and English political identities. I interpret Arnold's patterns of allusion as an inner dialogue assessing the Burkean sublime as anaesthetic for resolving Anglo-Irish conflict. This leads me to describe in a new way how Arnold's notion of detached cultural criticism operated in practice.

I come to several conclusions. First: Burke's and Dowden's crises of Anglo-Irish identity lead them to redefine both reconciliation and the idea of English national character. Second: the language of political reconciliation is a discourse of imperial government, and it can be either liberal or authoritarian. Third: as Arnold redefines culture and English national character he struggles to recuperate Burke's defense of English conciliatory government. Finally: postcolonial intellectuals from James Joyce to the Archbishop Desmond Tutu have critically reconstructed the power dynamic of imperialist reconciliation along dialogic lines and reclaimed the term as a democratic ideal.