Tran, Hannah;
(2023)
Hazlitt and habit.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Preview |
Text
Tran_10182247_thesis.pdf Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Hannah Tran’s posthumous thesis ‘Hazlitt and Habit’ is an exploration of the peculiar intensity surrounding discussions of habit in the Romantic period, as seen particularly through the prism of William Hazlitt’s writings. It begins by analysing habit in its philosophical aspect, looking at the way in which the idea was treated by the three eighteenth-century philosophers David Hume, William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham, using Hazlitt as an occasional commentator on their formulations. It then moves on to political habit – a key idea of the great counter-revolutionary statesman Edmund Burke. Having established the philosophical and political stakes in play in any discussion of habit in this period, the thesis then turns towards literature, and towards Hazlitt, exploring the way in which several different aspects of the theme are dramatized inside and outside his writings. These are: (1) ‘character’ (the psychology of habit); (2) habit and the city (the metropolis and mental life); (3) the relationship between habit and the essay form (the essay as a means of testing the stability or instability of opinions over time); and, lastly, (4) cultural habit, ideas of national character and characteristics, with particular reference to the politically ambivalent legacy of ‘Merry England’. Ms. Tran’s plan was to ‘block out’ the thesis from the beginning, that is, to research and write each chapter sequentially, one after the other, and then, and only then, to go back and revise it extensively at the end. Tragically, she died before she could undertake this last phase of the process. The only section that was subjected to any kind of revision was Chapter V – on Hazlitt, the Essay and Repetition – which was reworked for publication in 2022. Still, it is thanks to Hannah’s approach that what we have inherited from her is not a polished but ambiguous fragment but a complete first draft, a first draft in which the overall intended structure of the thesis, as well as each separate supporting element, can be clearly seen. The handling of the argument is, I think, more confident and thorough in the first half of the thesis; in the later chapters it is more speculative. This is particularly the case with the last chapter, which was written shortly before the author’s death. Gregory Dart July 2023
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Hazlitt and habit |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10182247 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
