In this beautiful, humane, and learned book, Ashraf Rushdy distinguishes gratitude understood as a burden-dispelling transaction of 'economic' justice from gratitude as a sentiment that binds us to one another by ties of affection and recognition of mutual dependence.
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy is the Benjamin Waite Professor of the English Language at Wesleyan University. He is the author of After Injury: A Historical Anatomy of Forgiveness, Resentment, and Apology (OUP 2018) and Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (OUP 1999).