This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.

The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural practices of law and literature mutually negotiate each other and on the question after the ontological commensurability of the domains. This volume offers, for the first time, an attempt to provide an interface between these overlapping interdisciplinary endeavours of literary studies, legal studies, and diaspora studies. In doing so, it explores new approaches and invites new perspectives on diasporas, migration and the disciplines that study them, hopefull also adding to the cultural resources of coping with a swiftly changing social landscape in a globalizing world.

Europe is a broad and multifaceted construct, variously understood as a geographical, political, legal, institutional, social, or cultural formation. It is characterized by numerous conflicts and processes of negotiation that have accompanied or sustained the development of normative orders and divergent conceptions of law, both in relation to individual states and to Europe as a whole. The same applies to the field of literature, language, and aesthetics; numerous myths and ideologies have shaped today’s understanding of Europe and still support it today. This volume examines how such processes were legally structured, and literarily addressed, criticized, and complemented. Its interdisciplinary perspective and open and dynamic, both dialogical and dialectical format intends to replicate the fragmented, sometimes conflicting, but always productive mosaic of voices, ideas, and concepts that have constituted and still constitute Europe, whether in the past, present, or future. Instead of resolving any of the complexities and contradictions that frame discussions on law, literature, and Europe, it aims to induce further engagement and confrontations with new and alternative visions of Europe.

European Union citizenship is a novel and complex legal status. Since its formal conception in the Maastricht Treaty, EU citizenship has catalysed an extraordinary, and ongoing, legal experiment, the development and implications of which are traced comprehensively throughout this book. EU Citizenship Law articulates, explains, and analyses the legal framework and legal developments that have shaped the status of EU citizenship and the rights that it confers on Member State nationals. By examining how the rights and responsibilities produced by EU citizenship relate to other rights conferred by EU law, the distinctive meaning and scope - the added legal value - of EU citizenship is uncovered. But the legal story examined here sits in deeper and wider economic, political, social, and emotional contexts because EU citizenship is also an idea: a vector of European integration, collective personhood, and multi-layered identities that reflects the paradoxically inclusive and exclusive qualities of citizenship more generally. EU citizenship challenges us to consider the worth and deepen the protection of the person, and to shape a European Union where principles and values really matter. Thorough yet accessible, this work provides a comprehensive legal reference point for the progression of debates about what EU citizenship law actually 'is,' and for the continuing study and practice of EU citizenship law.

Citizenship is at the forefront of popular imagination as political movements and state governments around the world traffic in anti-immigrant rhetoric and call for increased policing of borders. Literature and Citizenship in the Age of Revolution: A Wish for Air and Liberty looks back to a critical historical juncture in the development of citizenship to uncover how literature contoured and contested imaginings of citizenship. While territory and the nation-state often frame our understanding of citizenship, this book focuses on how non-citizens, foreigners, and strangers have long been central to citizenship’s coherence. Rather than rootedness, literary texts exposed the circulations of persons, ideas, and affections at the heart of citizenship. This book brings together an unlikely combination of writers—Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Herman Melville—to show how literature in the Age of Revolution exposed contradictions in notions of liberty and slavery that impacted how citizenship was conceived and practiced.

Analyzes women's activist writings to shed light on contemporary struggles for substantive citizenship in India. From Aristotle to Seneca, ancient philosophers considered anger to be aggressive and incompatible with rational conduct, and later thinkers associated this "illogical" emotion with femininity and its flaws. In Acts of Angry Writing: On Citizenship and Orientalism in Postcolonial India, author Alessandra Marino looks at anger differently, as an essential condition for writing in contexts of struggle. Analyzing the activist literature and autobiographical writings of Indian writers Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, and Sampat Pal, Marino sheds light on anger as a trigger for the political writing where struggles for the basic rights of indigenous people and lower castes are fought. Acts of Angry Writing is divided into four parts. In the first two, Marino focuses on Roy and Devi to analyze the relation between the authors' works and some of the most famous actions of social protest in which they have been involved. In the third part, Marino examines the representation of anger as a productive emotion in Warrior in a Pink Sari,the autobiography of Sampat Pal, a telling example of the close relation between literature, social reality, and ongoing political debates.Marino concludes by reflecting on the link between an ethical call that initiates acts of social protest and the writing related to active citizenship movements in contemporary rural India. Acts of Angry Writingwill be informative reading for scholars in a range of fields, from cultural and postcolonial studies to gender studies, South Asian studies, and citizenship studies. Its rich discussion of performativity and speech acts theory bridges the gap between the fields of literary theory, law, and citizenship.

As questions of citizenship generate new debates for this generation of Americans, Brook Thomas argues for revitalizing the role of literature in civic education. Thomas defines civic myths as compelling stories about national origin, membership, and values that are generated by conflicts within the concept of citizenship itself. Selected works of literature, he claims, work on these myths by challenging their terms at the same time that they work with them by relying on the power of narrative to produce compelling new stories. Civic Myths consists of four case studies: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and "the good citizen"; Edward Everett Hale's "The Man without a Country" and "the patriotic citizen"; Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and "the independent citizen"; and Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men and "the immigrant citizen." Thomas also provides analysis of the civic mythology surrounding Abraham Lincoln and the case of Ex parte Milligan. Engaging current debates about civil society, civil liberties, civil rights, and immigration, Thomas draws on the complexities of law and literature to probe the complexities of U.S. citizenship.

Examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature.

After its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether the law and literature movement would retain vitality. This collection of essays, featuring twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments as well as law schools, showcases the vibrancy of recent work in the field while highlighting its many new directions. New Directions in Law and Literature furnishes an overview of where the field has been, its recent past, and its potential futures. Some of the essays examine the methodological choices that have affected the field; among these are concern for globalization, the integration of approaches from history and political theory, the application of new theoretical models from affect studies and queer theory, and expansion beyond text to performance and the image. Others grapple with particular intersections between law and literature, whether in copyright law, competing visions of alternatives to marriage, or the role of ornament in the law's construction of racialized bodies. The volume is designed to be a course book that is accessible to undergraduates and law students as well as relevant to academics with an interest in law and the humanities. The essays are simultaneously intended to be introductory and addressed to experts in law and literature. More than any other existing book in the field, New Directions furnishes a guide to the most exciting new work in law and literature while also situating that work within more established debates and conversations.

In the 1990s, the Maastricht Treaty introduced the right to free movement for EU citizens. In practice, however, there are substantial barriers to making use of this right, particularly to integration and to accessing the social and welfare rights available. This is particularly true when it comes to accessing social rights, such as social assistance, housing benefit, study grants and health care. This book provides a detailed description and thorough analysis of these barriers, in both law and practice.