Literature for a Society of Equals

<p><em>Literature for a Society of Equals</em> defends modern equality and seeks its best literature. It accuses equality’s supposed friends on the left of attenuating this world-redefining relationship into a collection of rights and goods to distribute secularizing it even as the right keeps sacralizing hierarchies and optimistically handing it over to time to make it happen. In contrast loyal to equality as modernity’s revolutionary invention the writers examined here—from Mary Shelley to Gwendolyn Brooks to Ta-Nehisi Coates—envision relational equality as lately recovered by philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson and historians like Pierre Rosanvallon. Literary scholars need to reread these pessimist egalitarians too though for the discipline has failed them in the same three ways: i.e. attenuating and secularizing these writers’ portraits of equality but most of all insisting the sympathy generated by reading these texts will with enough time expand the circle of humanity. For students and teachers of literature at the university level this volume is a guide to those writings that champion equality as relational sacred and ours—not time's—to realize.</p>