Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility

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.

Author: Hina Nazar
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 07/06/2012
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780823240074

Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2013

About the Author

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