Chapter 5 - Enlightenments

Summary

Goldsmith’s status as an Enlightenment writer is a matter of debate. He was a translator of French Enlightenment writing for an anglophone audience, but he was also, in his verse and elsewhere, a traditionalist whose worldview could sit oddly with the progressive nature of much of his prose output. In accounting for a multiplicity of enlightenments, categorized in terms of the intellectual cultures of different nations, this chapter studies Goldsmith’s relationship to a more plural enlightenment, an Irish variant on a more general enlightenment commitment to an improved future.