Abstract
This dissertation portfolio examines the literary roots of prison abolitionist thought by tracing a “prehistory” of prison abolition in the Victorian era. While prison abolition is often framed as a contemporary response to mass incarceration, rooted in slavery abolition, this project extends this history by exploring nascent moments of abolition in literary works at a critical time in both literary and carceral history. This project argues that abolitionist imaginaries have long circulated literary form and that the prison abolitionist imagination is a literary imagination. By way of an extended “rumination,” a term I use to bring the most current articulation of the word “abolition” into focus, this work defines and redefines abolition as a signifier that shifts and adapts across contexts. The grammar of abolition I engage with throughout the project is fundamentally tied to the shaping of collective imaginaries, informing and constructing new imaginaries through narrative that can gesture towards alternative futures.
Bringing together literary analysis, through close readings of two nineteenth-century texts–Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and William Morris’s News From Nowhere, and carceral history and abolitionist theory, Visions of Social Impact: The Literary Nexus of Abolitionist Imaginaries and Victorian Studies reframes Victorian literature not as a passive reflection of penal reform, but as an active site of early prison abolitionist thinking. Drawing on such nineteenth-century writers as Jeremy Bentham, Dickens, Morris, as well as contemporary abolitionists, among them Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jackie Wang and Mariame Kaba, this project interrogates how narrative form, genre, and metaphor shape and are shaped by carceral landscapes. I argue that the nineteenth century is crucial to the history of prison abolition, not only because of the surge in prison reform but also due to the ways in which literature, as both a reflective and generative cultural tool, illuminated potential spaces of freedom and/or confinement within the form, opening up space for imaginative and material terrains in which communities might thrive without prisons.
This portfolio consists of several components that seek to ground prison abolitionist imaginaries in literary history and form in order to argue that literature is a viable tool for solving the pressing problems of mass incarceration. The final chapters offer pedagogical and applied methods through lesson plans, a sample syllabus, and a community engaged project that culminates in an abolitionist “Workbook.” In centering the literary imagination as a prison abolitionist imagination, I offer a new genealogy of abolition that foregrounds the power of storytelling to shape more just futures with accompanying models that make contemporary abolitionist work visible and viable.