Evolving bodies and abject imperialities: Evolution, body, and selfhood in Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and A'mâk-i Hayâl

This thesis examines Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll and A'mâk-ı Hayâl (1910) by Şehbenderzade Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Bey in their engagements with evolutionary theory and constructions of narratives of self-transformation. Both these novels invite interpretations through the bildungsroman genre as they concern individuals' developments. However, their engagements with modern evolutionary thought complicate their representations of transformation and development. The first chapter contextualises Alice's Adventures in Wonderland within the multiplicity of evolutionary ideas in Victorian England. In this text, transformations within the narrative and the body of the protagonist reflect the tensions between competing evolutionary models. In this light, this narrative works like a self-reflexive bildungsroman, questioning the concept of self-development. Moving on to A'mâk-ı Hayâl, the second chapter examines its integration of Sufi mysticism with the modern evolutionary thought. The way this novel interprets evolution also shapes the text's formal structure by blending old narrative conventions with the novel form. In this light, this text serves as an Ottoman bildungsroman which blends multiple scientific perspectives and old and new literary conventions discussed in the late Ottoman context. The final chapter situates these texts within an inter-imperial comparative framework to examine the interplay between the themes of bodily instability and the encounter with the other. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, this section foregrounds how transforming bodies become sites of both estrangement and permeability in these narratives. This concludes by arguing that in these texts, evolutionary theme serves to represent blurring boundaries of the self in imperial encounters.