Citizen-Saints

What is a person? Who is my neighbor? These fundamental questions about group membership and social formation have been posed repeatedly in political and religious discourses. Citizen-Saint uses keys works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton to examine the aims, limits, and legacies of classic and modern citizenship in Western literature. Turning to the potent idea of political theology to recover the strange mix of political and religious thinking during the Renaissance, Julia Reinhard Lupton unveils the figure of the citizensaint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception. Embodied by such diverse personages as Antigone, Paul, Barabbas, Shylock, Othello, Caliban, Isabella, and Samson, the citizen-saint is a sacrificial figure: a model of moral and aesthetic extremity that inspires new regimes of citizenship with his or her traumatic passage into the public sphere. And these scenes of civic entry ultimately dramatize the literature of citizenship in both its evident impasses and its enduring potential.