We Are Kings - Political Theology and the Making of a Modern Individual (Hardcover)

When British and American leaders today talk of the nation-whether it is Theresa May, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump-they do so, in part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British literature. The city on a hill and the sovereign individual are tropes at the center of modern Anglo-American political thought, and the literature that accompanied Britain's rise to imperial prominence played a key role in creating them. We Are Kings is the first book to interpret eighteenth-century British literature from the perspective of political theology. Spencer Jackson returns here to a body of literature long associated with modernity's origins without assuming that modernity entails a separation of the religious from the profane. The result is a study that casts this literature in a surprisingly new light. From the patriot to the marriage plot, the narratives and characters of eighteenth-century British literature are the products of the politicization of religion, Jackson argues; the real story of this literature is neither secularization nor the survival of orthodox Judeo-Christianity but rather the expansion of a movement beginning in the High Middle Ages to transfer the transcendent authority of the Catholic Church to the English political sphere. The novel and the modern individual, then, are in a sense both secular and religious at once-products of a modern political faith that has authorized Anglo-American exceptionalism from the eighteenth century to the present.

General

Imprint:	University of Virginia Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	September 2020
Authors:	Spencer Jackson
Dimensions:	229 x 152mm (L x W)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	230
ISBN-13:	978-0-8139-4471-5
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
LSN:	0-8139-4471-6
Barcode:	9780813944715

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