Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility - Hardcover

Nazar, Hina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082324007X ISBN 13: 9780823240074

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the enlightenment’s liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as “sentimentalism.” Nazar argues that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic
judgment and underrates its contributions to the key Enlightenment norm of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, the author contends that sentimental judgment complicates received understandings of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability and, as such, implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.

About this title

About the Author

Hina Nazar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Review

Nazar must be commended for writing a lively and accessible introduction to eighteenth-century philosophy and sentimental literature, as well as a study that is refreshingly interested in the modern-day applications of its subject. (―Eighteenth-Century Fiction)

"This remarkable book enriches our knowledge of Enlightenment thought and its significance for understanding of a major strand of prose fiction written during the long eighteenth century.” (―Harry Shaw Cornell University)

“A major reference for the application of Arendtian thinking to modern British
literary history.”

(―David Thomas University of Notre Dame)

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 082324007X
• ISBN 13: 9780823240074
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192