Description
Book SynopsisAn 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 couldand who could notbe 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 naturaliz
Trade Review
...superbly interdisciplinary book...
—International Journal of Law in Context
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Open Country
Part I: Theories of Naturalization
Chapter 1. Naturalization in History
Chapter 2. Ideas of Naturalization
Part II: Fictions of Naturalization
Chapter 3. Law of the Foreign Father
Chapter 4. Open-Door Domestic Fiction
Part III: Relations of Naturalization
Chapter 5. Unnatural-Born Subjects
Coda
Notes
Index
