Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Before Borders : A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization, Hardback Book

Before Borders : A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization Hardback

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

An ambitious revisionist history of naturalization as a creative mechanism for national expansion. Before borders determined who belonged in a country and who did not, lawyers and judges devised a legal fiction called naturalization to bypass the idea of feudal allegiance and integrate new subjects into their nations.

At the same time, writers of prose fiction were attempting to undo centuries of rules about who could-and who could not-be a subject of literature.

In Before Borders, Stephanie DeGooyer reconstructs how prose and legal fictions came together in the eighteenth century to dramatically reimagine national belonging through naturalization.

The bureaucratic procedure of naturalization today was once a radically fictional way to create new citizens and literary subjects. Through early modern court proceedings, the philosophy of John Locke, and the novels of Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley, DeGooyer follows how naturalization evolved in England against the backdrop of imperial expansion.

Political and philosophical proponents of naturalization argued that granting foreigners full political and civil rights would not only attract newcomers but also better attach them to English soil.

However, it would take a new literary form-the novel-to fully realize this liberal vision of immigration.

Together, these experiments in law and literature laid the groundwork for an alternative vision of subjecthood in England and its territories. Reading eighteenth-century legal and prose fiction, DeGooyer draws attention to an overlooked period of immigration history and compels readers to reconsider the creative potential of naturalization.

Information

Save 6%

£79.00

£73.95

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information