- Volume 65 (2020)
- Vol. 65 (2020)
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- Issue 4
- No. 4
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- Pages 367 - 382
- pp. 367 - 382
Storied Citizenship: Imagining the Citizen in American Literature
Pages 367 - 382
DOI https://doi.org/10.33675/AMST/2020/4/4
open-access
This publication is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0.
“Citizenship” has seen an astounding revival as an analytical category, not only in Political Theory and the Social Sciences but also in Literary and Cultural Studies. Through “storying” citizenship (Chariandy), works of literature can productively negotiate established “civic myths” of citizenship (Thomas), i. e., stories about normative national membership; moreover, they point to contradictions, inclusions and exclusions, and shifts in understandings of what constitutes a citizen in a globalized world. This introduction provides an overview of important issues and approaches that have shaped “citizenship” as an analytical category in American Literary Studies in the past fifteen years. Focusing on the (largely neglected) systematic distinction between “citizenship” and “the citizen,” it highlights the necessity of scrutinizing how literature imagines and narrates particular kinds of citizens and how such images tie in with, counter, or modify long-standing normative models of the citizen—in short, how literature “stories” citizenship and the citizen as potentially both normative and emancipatory concepts of political belonging and participation.
Keywords: storied citizenship; civic myth; proliferation of citizenship; Cincinnatus
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