Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity by Jamison Kantor

Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity by Jamison Kantor

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Summary

This book reveals the development of a progressive sense of honor and dignity – against its usual counterpoint, freedom – within nineteenth-century British poetry, prose, and abolitionist media. For readers of literature, sociology, politics, and economics, it offers a rich cultural history of a value long viewed as reactionary and regressive.

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Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity by Jamison Kantor

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.
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.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781009124140
ISBN 10 1009124145
Title Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity
Author Jamison Kantor
Series Cambridge Studies In Romanticism
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Year published 2025-06-26
Number of pages 210
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.