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.
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