Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity

by Jamison Kantor

Overview

Despite our preconceptions, Romantic writers, artists, and philosophers did not think of honor as an archaic or regressive concept, but as a contemporary, even progressive value that operated as a counterpoint to freedom, a well-known preoccupation of the period's literature. Focusing on texts by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Mary Prince, and Mary Seacole, this book argues that the revitalization of honor in the first half of the nineteenth century signalled a crisis in the emerging liberal order, one with which we still wrestle today: how can political subjects demand real, materialist forms of dignity in a system dedicated to an abstract, and often impoverished, idea of 'liberty'? Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity presents both a theory and a history of this question in the media of the Black Atlantic, the Jacobin novel, the landscape poem, and the “financial” romance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009302418
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/19/2023
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Jamison Kantor is an assistant professor of English at The Ohio State University. His essays have appeared in journals including PMLA, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. His recent piece in Jump Cut considers autocracy in the films of Jorgos Lanthimos.

Table of Contents

1. Soliloquies in praise of chivalry: Burke, Godwin, and the politics of honor; 2. Say, What is honor: Wordsworth and the value of honor; 3. Full faith and credit: honor, finance, and the neofeudal utopia in Scott and Austen; 4. Black in character as in complexion: abolitionist media and the honorable body of Mary Prince.