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We Are Kings: Political Theology and the Making of a Modern Individual
Hardcover
ISBN13: 9780813944715
Publisher: Univ Of Virginia Pr
Published: Sep 3 2020
Pages: 230
Weight: 1.12
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
When British and American leaders today talk of the nation--whether it is Boris Johnson, 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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