{"product_id":"ferguson-frances-records-ofpb","title":"[09\/07\/26] Ferguson, Frances: Records of Reward: Essays on Literature and Value","description":"\u003cp\u003eUniversity of Chicago Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 7, 2026\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson's critical writing over four decades.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRanging 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGathering Ferguson's most influential and still timely essays, \u003ci\u003eRecords of Reward\u003c\/i\u003e includes, among others, \"The Nuclear Sublime,\" in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley's \u003ci\u003eFrankenstein \u003c\/i\u003eto 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 \u003ci\u003eClarissa\u003c\/i\u003e; \"Pornography, the Theory,\" where she explores the threshold between speech and action to identify environments--such as schools and workplaces--in which pornographic expression can be harmfully potentiated; and \"Jane Austen, \u003ci\u003eEmma\u003c\/i\u003e, and the Impact of Form,\" in which she analyzes Austen's use of free indirect style to depict both her protagonist and her reader engaged in acts of \"over-knowing\" others in everyday life. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, the collection also includes an essay analyzing Bitcoin as a small language model that exerts enormous affective pressure on its partisans.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA vivid demonstration of the enduring rewards of theory and close reading alike, \u003ci\u003eRecords of Reward\u003c\/i\u003e will be essential reading across the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and political thought.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45359788425239,"sku":"9780226849539","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/71vcQ6Y-cKL._SL1500.jpg?v=1785532312","url":"https:\/\/open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com\/products\/ferguson-frances-records-ofpb","provider":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","version":"1.0","type":"link"}