Records of Reward

Essays on Literature and Value

A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Fergusons critical writing over four decades.

Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how formswhether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratichelp 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 activitiesthe 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 Fergusons most influential and still timely essays, Records of Reward includes, among others, The Nuclear Sublime, in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein