LCCN2011-046354
Reviews"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, "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, ". . . Uses sentimentalism to critique contemporary attacks on Enlightenment liberalism." --Choice "Analyzes works by David Hume, Adam Smith, Jane Austen, Samuel Richarson, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, William Godwin, and Henry Mackenzie." --The Chronicle Review "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 "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
SynopsisEnlightened 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., 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., 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, she 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.
LC Classification NumberPR830.S45N39 2012