The field of honor : essays on southern character and American identity /

This collection of 18 essays provides focused commentary on the concept of honor as it appears in southern writing, from the founders to 21st-century conservatives. The volume will be a useful supplement to studies of American national moral character as well as to regionalists. Topics include honor in the marketplace, the law, literature, politics, and social reputation and respect. Authors featured for their writing on honor include Nathaniel Hawthorne (no southerner!), Thomas Nelson Page, and Andrew Lytle. Editor Mayfield views this project as an effort to update Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor (CH, Feb'82), though Wyatt-Brown here is used more as straw man than springboard. The editor's protestation that southern honor is not only an affair of white male elites is not helped by the inclusion of only one essay, by Jeffrey Anderson, on honor within African American male social organizations. Scholars of US philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, as well as regionalists, will find the extensive bibliography valuable. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. --Elena Thompson, University of Maryland University College