| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation uses the lens of ruin and ruination to interrogate the workings of empire, broadly defined. Ruination, the ongoing creation of ruin, continues across historical time and exists in physical and remembered forms, as well as textually constructed memorials like novels and life writing. This dissertation argues women are ruin and detritus of empire while constituting imperialism as constructive actors. They both perpetuate empire and become the wreckage, reflecting imperialism back onto itself. This dissertation searches for and examines the moments where ruination is experienced or prevented, where regulatory standards regarding women’s bodies are troubled, or where violence is imposed. Chapter One argues that sexual transgression in early eighteenth-century novels requires explicit association between women characters and the colonial economy. The second chapter moves from London and prose fiction to the southeastern coast of India and life writing, arguing that ruin and ruination in fact define imperialism in India in the mid-eighteenth century. The work of imperialism occurs in small, personal interactions, holding up its more visible edifices of occupation and exploitation. The third chapter places two different accounts of the Haitian Revolution next to one another, juxtaposing narrative form, the causes of revolutions, and the effects. Chapter Three argues Black ecofeminism, the tying of liberation of bodies to liberation of nature, counters white imperialism. The epilogue looks forward to nineteenth-century iterations of the “ruined” woman, finding inescapable reminders of the violence of settler colonialism and violent reactions to disability. This dissertation extends and complicates historical arguments regarding the ruins of imperialism to argue people are also left with the debris of bodies—physical, narrative, metaphorical. Ruin and ruination can be and have been written on both actual and literary bodies. | en_US |
