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Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Daniel R. Mangiavellano

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” argues that habit is a central characteristic of both Romantic and Victorian theories of imagination, originality, literary production, and subjectivity. Certainly, nineteenth-century culture often treats habit with suspicion, invoking language of bondage, slavery, and dangerous unconscious imitation to apply to everything from reading habits to opium use. However, by tracing a discourse of habit from association theory to pragmatism and drawing from philosophical, educational, medical, and psychological texts, I foreground how Romantic and Victorian texts redeploy habit as a paradoxical form of imaginative agency. In nineteenth-century culture, habit makes possible what …