Table of Contents

Introduction: Placeless People: Writing, Rights and Refugees
PART ONE: READING STATELESSNESS
1: Reading Statelessness: Arendt's Kafka
2: Arendt's Message of Ill-Tidings
PART TWO: PLACELESS PEOPLE
3: Orwell's Jews
4: Weil's Uprooted
5: Beckett's Expelled
PART THREE: SANDS OF SORROW
6: Sands of Sorrow: Dorothy Thompson in Palestine
7: Statelessness and the Poetry of the Borderline: W.H. Auden and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh

Promotional Information

Winner of the MSA Book Prize

About the Author

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at University of Birmingham. Her books include: The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011/2014), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (with John Phillips, 1998), The Writing of Anxiety (2007), and British Fiction after Modernism (with Marina MacKay, 2007). She is currently
writing a short book on Literature and Human Rights for OUP's Literary Agendas series, and collaborating on a large interdisciplinary project, Refugee Hosts.

Reviews

Placeless People is an extraordinary book that deserves a wide readership. It is a ground-breaking contribution to the feld of literary refugee studies and a textbook example of how intellectual history can help us read literature and vice versa.
*Christos Hadjiyiannis, University of London, Stonebridge Review*

This carefully researched, elegantly and passionately argues book exemplifies the values of practicing "law and literature" for apprehending modern exile and understanding refugees.
*Stephanie Jones, University of Southampton*

The book is beautifully written, and brings an intricate perspective to the topics of rights, citizenship, statelessness and refugee experience.
*Charlotte Lydia Riley, University of Southampton, The Political Quarterly*

Scrupulously researched and documented, this invaluable and informative volume is illustrated with relevant photographs and quotations.
*B. Diemert, CHOICE*

A stunning study as much of literature's own "endurance beyond nation, and its worldly capacity to conjure up human community out of despair" as of migrant refuge and the powerplay of state refusal of refuge, via the 20th century's great writers of displacement.
*Ali Smith, Books of the Year 2018, The Guardian*

[An] incandescent and admirably polemical new book ... Placeless People should help change conversations about humanitarianism, migration, citizenship, and democracy.
*Hadji Bakara, Los Angeles Review of Books*

Magisterial.

Anybody seeking to understand the contemporary challenges faced by refugees, and the responses by nation states that view themselves as sovereign, will find in Placeless People clues as to how we got here and ideas as to what we ought to do next ... The book navigates contested themes from multiple viewpoints. In doing so, it illuminates historical and contemporary challenges to national distinctions, political communities and human rights.
*Matthew R. Joseph, Times Higher Education*

Placeless People delves deeply into the philosophy of human rights but with easy prose and a structure that would give anyone pause when thinking about our times ... This small book makes a fast but thought provoking read.
*Robert Davis, New York Journal of Books*

Stonebridge offers a nuanced and complex interdisciplinary treatment of the problems of citizenship, statelessness, and mass displacement.
*Choice*

[A] deft and incisive book ... The canon of writers assembled is one of Placeless People's great strengths ... The contribution Stonebridge makes lies in her readings. It is with close engagement that she demonstrates the ability of novels, poems, plays, and journalism to move beyond the banalising morality inherent to the idea that literature is a locus for empathy.
*Marc Mierowsky, Syndey Review of Books*

This is a book about displacement but it offers us ways to feel at home despite these toxic and hateful times.
*Les Back, New Humanist*

Lyndsey Stonebridge's Placeless People, whilst outwardly a study based in literary criticism and theory, works impressively through the wide-ranging implications of statelessness to explore the real meanings of citizenship and belonging through the eyes of some of the twentieth century's most innovative writers and thinkers ... Where this book distinguishes itself, for all scholars of placelessness, is its ability to move, through a sharplyfocussed discussion of some of the twentieth century's most renowned literary or philosophical voices, to offer insights into the ways in which, now as then,'[m]odern placelessness demonstrates how fragile everybody's place in the world is.
*Katherine Cooper, Migration Studies*

Lyndsey Stonebridge's excellent Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees is a welcome addition to this interdisciplinary field as well as to the broader field of twentieth-century literary and cultural studies.
*Kelly M. Rich, Contemporary Literature*

Lyndsey Stonebridge's sensitive and assertive book succeeds on a range of levels. Placeless People combines careful thinking on the situation of refugees, engaged moral philosophy, and purposeful literary criticism ... Full of fascinating information, fresh perspectives, and important episodes recovered from history, Placeless People is a valuable read for those working on the injustices of forced displacement and statelessness today.
*Process North*