Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1401.

Adviser: John Demos.

"Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and the Writing of Settlement in Colonial America" proposes that through the writing of seventeenth-century British colonial settlement in North America, trauma and catastrophe functioned culturally to initiate, negotiate, and articulate the wages of becoming colonial. I argue that traumatic reckoning was more than an individual reaction to physical suffering; it was a prism through which the ruptures of colonialism could be both expressed and contained. This study aims to trace how the discourse of misery structured the meaning of survival and demise throughout this colonial arena; to recognize how stories of life and death in the settlement era became inextricably bound together; and to look at how disaster narratives functioned to perpetuate, as well as to endure, unbearable violence.

Chapter One, "A Rumor of Roanoke," foregrounds the roles that rumor and abandonment played in the serial attempts to establish and rescue that colony, all of which failed. Chapter Two, "Laying Waste at Jamestown," concentrates on how both bodies and systems of significance deteriorated during the first five years of the Virginia colony, offers a theory of how anguish and atrocity structured meaning both within the settlement and at its borders. Chapter Three, "Burial in Plymouth," turns to the mortality crises surrounding Pawtuxet/Plymouth from 1616--1623. First recovering the texture of life and death in native and colonial communities, it then analyzes William Bradford's retrospective representation of those deaths and the sustained effort to create a cultural narrative of the Pilgrim settlement. Each of these chapters also uses narrative to recover historical voices and actions: including those of Ralph Lane, Winginia/Pemisipan, George Percy, Wowinchopunck, Phineas Pratt, Witawamut and others.

Settlers wrote of their "mixed sufferances"---suffering of both bodies and minds---as seasons of misery, and in that misery was encased both the violence and the confusion of colonial plantation. This study seeks to understand the historical means and consequences of representing the first several years of American colonial life as so many "seasons of misery" and how, in the narratives of catastrophe, the extremities of settlement history came to be both remembered and forgotten.