Idioms of Identity: William Hazlitt, Language, and Culture

Abstract

Believes that, though scattered throughout a voluminous body of journalistic prose, Hazlitt’s conception of culture is still recognizable, grounded as it is in language relations. Argues that throughout his writings Hazlitt demonstrates a preoccupation with the nature of language, his views reflecting the philosophical and political divisions cutting across Enlightenment language theory. His conception of culture emerges from his acute sense of how the self-referential medium of language virtually constructs the world in which we live.