Reviewed by:

• Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization by Stephanie Degooyer
• Juliet Shields

Stephanie DeGooyer declares two aims for Before Borders: first, to demonstrate that “naturalization in general is a far more radical procedure than we have realized” (2), and second, to show that it is also a “more profoundly generative and creative act than we have previously understood” (3). The book unquestionably achieves these important goals, but they are not, in the end, among its most wide-ranging or provocative arguments. Instead, these rest on an analogy between the early British novel and early naturalization law, both of which created subjects. While the idea that novels create subjects is nothing new, dating back at least to Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987), DeGooyer is interested in the political dimensions of subjecthood, understood as allegiance to a nation or government, rather than the psychological dimensions of subjectivity.

Before Borders returns us to a world of open borders, when territorial movement was often regulated at a relatively local level in Britain through vagrancy laws and Poor Laws. As it emerged in the seventeenth century, naturalization law aimed to protect “the right of the private individual to roam and settle anywhere they chose” (34), rather than the right of the refugee to stay. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this law “targeted a relatively select and wealthy group of white and male individuals” (54) and promoted England’s economic interests by making it an attractive place for wealthy merchants or industrious famers to settle. Naturalization law returned the individual “to an original state of liberty paradoxically by undoing the unnatural distinctions created by the mechanism of political language” (59). It did not require his acculturation, but simply “erased the conditions of [his] birth” (91). Naturalization law worked “not by showing [End Page 235] a fully realized interior individual but by narrating a life absent of subjectivity and interiority” (59). The former task remained to the novel.

As a genre, the novel was well-suited to the task of naturalization: “Just as there were no laws prohibiting foreigners from crossing national territories,” DeGooyer argues, “the novel, unlike the epic or tragedy, had no formal rules or system of generic governance for who or what could enter its pages” (12). Through a reading of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), a paradigmatic example of Armstrong’s “domestic fiction,” DeGooyer reminds us that early novels challenged the classical rules determining who was worthy of literary representation. They revolted “against the natural logics that had previously barred certain subjects from representation” and, by introducing these newcomers into their pages, naturalized them.

The early novel’s investment in naturalization was not limited to the thematization of transnational mobility that DeGooyer explores in her readings of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Sentimental Journey (1768). Rather, as her more radical readings of Pamela and Frankenstein (1818) illustrate, the novel’s formal processes worked to naturalize “unnatural” subjects. In doing so, DeGooyer seeks to uncouple novel and nation, suggesting that our collective focus on the novel’s role in creating imagined communities has overshadowed its exploration of what she calls the paranational—the undefined regions “inside and outside the nation and on and between territorial and imperial boundaries” (20). For scholars working on the history of the novel, this is perhaps a more impactful argument than the book’s claims about naturalization.

Yet DeGooyer positions this important argument against an outdated body of scholarship on the novel, one in which Ian Watt, Nancy Armstrong, and Michael McKeon are the dominant figures. According to DeGooyer, scholars have characterized the eighteenth-century novel as “interior-facing” and “nation-bound,” moving towards an ever more “dowdy domesticity” as the century draws to a close (19, 22). This is not a scholarly narrative that I recognize as current. DeGooyer cites many of the important studies that, over the past two decades, have shaped our understanding of the British novel as a porous form shaped by transnational networks of trade, migration, and imperialism...

审核人：

• 边界之前：斯蒂芬妮·德古耶 (Stephanie Degooyer)的归化法律和文学史
• 朱丽叶希尔兹

Stephanie DeGooyer 宣布了Before Borders的两个目标：首先，证明“一般来说，归化是一个比我们意识到的要激进得多的程序”(2)，其次，表明它也是一种“更深刻的生成和创造性行为比我们以前理解的要多”（3）。这本书无疑实现了这些重要目标，但最终它们并不是其最广泛或最具挑衅性的论点之一。相反，这些基于早期英国小说和早期入籍法之间的类比，两者都创造了主题。虽然小说创造主题的想法并不新鲜，但至少可以追溯到南希·阿姆斯特朗的《欲望与家庭小说》(Oxford University Press, 1987)，DeGooyer 对主体性的政治层面感兴趣，理解为对国家或政府的忠诚，而不是主体性的心理层面。

边界之前这让我们回到了一个边界开放的世界，当时在英国，领土流动通常通过流浪法和济贫法在相对地方的层面上受到监管。正如 17 世纪出现的那样，入籍法旨在保护“个人在他们选择的任何地方漫游和定居的权利”(34)，而不是难民留下来的权利。也许不足为奇的是，这项法律“针对的是相对精选和富有的白人和男性群体”(54)，并通过使其成为富有的商人或勤劳的农民定居的有吸引力的地方来促进英格兰的经济利益。归化法“通过消除政治语言机制造成的不自然的区别，自相矛盾地使个人恢复到原始的自由状态”（59）。它不需要他的文化适应，但只是“抹去了[他]出生的条件”（91）。归化法起作用“不是通过展示[第 235 页结束]一个完全实现的内在个体，但通过讲述一种没有主观性和内在性的生活”（59）。前一个任务留给了小说。

作为一种类型，小说非常适合入籍任务：“就像没有法律禁止外国人穿越国家领土一样，”DeGooyer 认为，“与史诗或悲剧不同，小说没有正式的规则或制度对谁或什么可以进入其页面的通用治理”(12)。通过阅读塞缪尔·理查森 (Samuel Richardson) 的《帕梅拉》 (1740)，这是阿姆斯特朗“家庭小说”的典范，德古耶提醒我们，早期的小说挑战了决定谁值得文学代表的经典规则。他们“反对以前禁止某些主题表现的自然逻辑”，并通过将这些新来者引入他们的页面，使他们归化。

早期小说对归化的投入并不局限于 DeGooyer 在阅读《鲁滨逊漂流记》（1719 年）和《感伤之旅》（1768 年）时探索的跨国流动的主题化。相反，随着她对帕梅拉和弗兰肯斯坦的更激进的解读(1818) 说明，小说的形式过程有助于使“非自然”主题自然化。在这样做的过程中，DeGooyer 试图将小说与国家分开，这表明我们对小说在创造想象社区中的作用的集体关注已经掩盖了它对她所谓的超国家的探索——“国家内外以及领土上和领土之间”的未定义区域和帝国边界”（20）。对于研究小说史的学者来说，这可能是比书中关于归化的主张更有影响力的论点。

然而，DeGooyer 将这一重要论点与小说中过时的学术研究相提并论，其中 Ian Watt、Nancy Armstrong 和 Michael McKeon 是主要人物。根据 DeGooyer 的说法，学者们将 18 世纪的小说描述为“面向内部”和“受国家约束”，随着世纪接近尾声，它正朝着越来越“邋遢的家庭生活”的方向发展 (19, 22)。这不是我认为是当前的学术叙述。DeGooyer 引用了许多重要的研究，在过去的二十年里，这些研究塑造了我们对英国小说作为一种由跨国贸易、移民和帝国主义网络塑造的多孔形式的理解……