世新大學圖書館

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-04, Section: A, page: 1365.

Adviser: James Thompson.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005.

This study examines the ways in which eighteenth-century authors curtail custom, typically conceived of as an appeal to practice, through writing. Although social historians and historical linguists have addressed the concept of custom, they have failed to explain its prevalence in the eighteenth-century literary imagination; literary historians and critics, on the other hand, have fallen prey to custom's inherent ambiguities and interpreted appeals to it as evidence for such conflicting positions as Filmerian patriarchy and Lockean contractarianism. In order to explain and avoid such contradictions, chapter 1 explores the intricacies of custom and suggests that custom itself cannot be written, that it is inextricably linked to oral forms of transmission and to lived experience. In codifying custom, eighteenth-century authors actually efface it.

Chapters 2 and 3 examine two forms of codification in turn: lexicography and legal commentary. In regards to lexicography, this study suggests that eighteenth-century dictionaries exploit custom's ambiguity to propagate a standard form of the language. Although this study examines a variety of dictionaries from Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall (1604) to Joseph Nicol Scott's A New Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) serves as the primary---if complicated---example of lexicography's authorization of a hierarchy within the language that reinforces a hierarchy within the nation. This study concludes by noting that eighteenth-century legal writing, like lexicography, celebrates custom even as it isolates and discredits it. In his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765--1769), William Blackstone, the first professor of English law, valorizes custom as "an oral, unwritten law" derived from the earliest British ancestors. Unlike Johnson's Preface to the Dictionary , which concludes by lamenting its own inefficacy, the final volume of Blackstone's Commentaries praises the mid-eighteenth century for improving the English constitution by reorienting the authority of custom from ambiguous practice to clear principles. These reorientations, whether in law or lexis, whether Whig or Tory, depend upon writing, and eighteenth-century attempts to write custom stand as obviations of it.

School code: 0153.