Before borders: a legal and literary history of naturalization by Stephanie DeGooyer

Hollingshead, David

Before borders: a legal and literary history of naturalization by Stephanie DeGooyer

Author

Hollingshead, David

Date

2024

Keywords

literary criticism, naturalization

Abstract (summary)

Let me begin with an unequivocal endorsement: anyone interested in the fields of novels studies or law and literature will find Before Borders deeply rewarding to read. It is historically rich, rigorously researched, and confidently polemical in ways I will elaborate below. But this monograph should be of interest to scholars, regardless of expertise, as a pedagogical document, one that expertly models the rhetorical move of the scholarly intervention, what we sometimes call the "so what?" question of research work. What begins, in the first chapter, as an exegesis of underexamined seventeenth-century juridical documents that reimagined political subjectivity following the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns quickly coalesces into a set of powerful claims that bear heavily on contemporary understandings of the novel, the nation, and the concept of naturalization in literary studies. Moving briskly between early modern legal theory (Blackstone, Locke, Bacon), canonical works of fiction (Richardson, Defoe, Burney, Mary Shelley), and contemporary criticism (Arendt, Barthes, Benedict Anderson, Jacques Rancière), Stephanie DeGooyer always keeps a keen eye on her study's high argumentative stakes.

Publication Information

Hollingshead, D. (2024). Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization by Stephanie DeGooyer. Eighteenth Century Fiction, 36(2), 352–356. https://doi.org/10.3138/ecf.36.2.352