Records of Reward: Essays on Literature and Value (Thinking Literature)

A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson's critical writing over four decades. Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how forms--whether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratic--help to assign value and thereby organize our relations as well as our personal identities. Ferguson is a literary critic who takes her lead, unexpectedly, from Jeremy Bentham, showing how modernity tracks and makes perceptible the values of a host of human activities--the knowledge that comes from early learning exercises, the specialized knowledge that funds particular professions, and the exacting if unspecialized knowledge of the social world of courtship or hanging out. Gathering Ferguson's most influential and still timely essays, Records of Reward includes, among others, "The Nuclear Sublime," in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to examine how the aesthetic logic of the sublime obscures the claims of domesticity and the beautiful; "Rape and the Rise of the Novel," which examines the history of rape law to highlight the importance of Samuel Richardson's foregrounding of consent in Clarissa; "Pornography, the Theory,"…