Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity

This rich cultural history shows how honor, as much as freedom, inspired poets, novelists, and abolitionists of the nineteenth century.

Jamison Kantor (Author)

9781009124140, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 June 2025

210 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.314 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]