How should we write the literary history of modern statelessness? Lyndsey Stonebridge's remarkable book Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees locates the answer to this urgent question primarily in the lives and works of six major writers: Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Thompson, and W. H. Auden. What unites this somewhat oddly assorted group is less a convergence of style or topic, still less of genre—since their output includes novels, poetry, journalism, political philosophy, and theology—but rather what Stonebridge shows to be a broad concern with the politics of human suffering, loss, and exile. As with her previous monograph, the award-winning study The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), Placeless People's historical center of gravity lies in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and each book takes the international political settlement with which the Second World War closed as a source of unfinished business that...

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