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Before Borders

A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization

Stephanie DeGooyer author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Johns Hopkins University Press

Published:3rd Jan '23

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Before Borders cover

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.

...superbly interdisciplinary book...
International Journal of Law in Context
[Before Borders] offers sustained readings of certain English novels of the long 18th century, against the backdrop of early modern changes in the laws and politics of naturalization. DeGooyer works nimbly back and forth between law and literature to trace a history of contiguous legal fictions.
Public Books
DeGooyer's book is precisely the kind of deeply informed and critically searching historical work we need...Before Borders is an outstanding example of such revisioning (to use Adrienne Rich's word). Through exceptional scholarship DeGooyer provides a powerfully reconstructed legal and cultural imaginary, the process of naturalization whereby it was acknowledged that a person's relation to place is not fixed.
American Literary History

ISBN: 9781421443911

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm

Weight: 408g

216 pages