DISSERTATION
The image of the hut is a potent symbol in human imagination, occupying a considerable segment of architectural history and imagination, its presence being more powerful as ideas than as actual or practical structures. In most ideational treatment of the hut -- the hut as primitive, originary, paradisal, archetypal or regenerative -- it has been pursued as an elemental dwelling. Included in this genre is also the hermit's hut, the actual or the ideational structure that belongs to a hermit, recluse or ascetic. The dissertation explores the hermit's hut as a key trope in ascetic discourse and its significance in cultural and architectural imagination.