Abstract

Recent scholarship has revealed the extent of eighteenth‐century debates about the salience of honor in a rapidly modernizing Britain. However, Maria Edgeworth's contributions to these debates have not been recognized, perhaps because of the uneven and disputed modernization of her adopted home, Ireland, with its three competing eighteenth‐century “honor worlds.” Ireland's shifting and contested eighteenth‐century honor discourses shape and misshape the text of Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and its authorship, narration, reception, and paratext. Initially resolved by inculcating the emergent Irish Catholic middle class with modern honor principles through the narrative actions of a novel bardic poet narrator, Thady Quirk, the text ultimately undercuts its own resolution of the problem of modern Irish honor. Instead, because of her own potential loss of honor, effected by the 1801 Union with Great Britain, Edgeworth subverts the bardic work of her character‐narrator in her novel's paratext. Ironically, Edgeworth's honor and that of her family would be restored by the favorable reception of the very text that attempted to resolve the issue of the modern salience of honor in Ireland and then rejected its own resolution.

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