Abstract
Over the last few decades, the field of law and literature studies has increasingly focused on the importance of literary texts in the interpretation of legal doctrines developing wider perspectives on society and on the law’s effect on the community itself. By considering the dynamic relationship between narrative works and legal documents, the present analysis proposes a reading of Joseph Conrad’s short story “Amy Foster” (1901), which focusses on the investigation of the social and political aspects of migration in late nineteenth-century Britain. Echoes of the migrant figure as represented in Conrad’s story can be found in the Aliens Act, the law passed by the British government in 1905 to regulate the flux of migrants from Eastern Europe. Taking into account the legal value of the Aliens Act and the social consequences of its application, the article will first examine general views on migration at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will later explore the language used in the statute and its relevance in the short story. To this end, the notion of “undesirable immigrant,” first introduced to describe migrants with well-defined characteristics, is anticipated by Joseph Conrad in “Amy Foster” whose protagonist, Yanko Goorall, is an emigrant from Eastern Europe. Conrad’s fictional representation of Goorall as an “undesirable immigrant” allows us to reflect on how his writing deals with (and anticipates) events and socio-cultural trends.
About the author
Tania Zulli is Associate Professor of English at the University of Roma Tre, Italy. She is the author of books and essays on colonial and postcolonial literature and culture. She has published the volumes Nadine Gordimer. Strategie narrative di una transizione politica (Liguori 2005); Cultural Transitions. Literature and Culture in the Late Victorian Age (Peter Lang 2011); Come leggere ‘A Passage to India’ (Solfanelli 2014); and Joseph Conrad. Language and Transnationalism (Solfanelli, 2019). She has edited a collection of essays on H. Rider Haggard’s novel She (She. Explorations into a Romance 2009) and co-edited a special issue of Merope on E. M. Forster (E. M. Forster Revisited: Epistemic Disconnection, Otherness and Beyond 2015). Her research interests are now concentrated on translation studies and on the stylistic analysis of literary texts. Her translation of Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster” has recently been published by Marsilio (2018). She is founding member of AISC (Associazione Italiana di Studi Conradiani) and secretary of CUSVE (Centro di Studi Vittoriani e Edoardiani). She is a member of the editorial boards of Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, and Merope.
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