Enlightened Sentiments Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility [Hardcover]

Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the enlightenments 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.

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. 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.Enlightened Sentiments urges us to reconsider the claims of Enlightenment modernity by radically recasting the contributions of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Highlighting its motif of judgment, Nazar complicates recent recuperations of sentimental culture as an affective outlier vis-?-vis the mainstream Enlightenment, as well as postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger only of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.

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