As every reader of Lucian knows, he always belongs to something without belonging to it wholly. His relationship to his own Greek identity is undoubtedly the most symbolic instance: although wholly mastering the Greek language, he emphasises his being a barbarian. Lucian’s foreignness is a typical mark of his protean authorial persona throughout his œuvre, producing a constant tension between an inside and an outside as Lucian emphasises his own paradoxical liminality. This chapter discusses six of his texts (True Histories, Scythian, The Hall, On Salaried Posts, Symposium, and Lexiphanes), suggesting that a movement towards the inside and then the outside marks Lucian’s textuality in disparate ways. Depending on the specific narrative context, this movement assumes different meanings (autobiographical, metaphorical, metapoetical, rhetorical) that are often combined with each other, but most importantly produces a fundamental tension between meaning itself and the absence of significance.

Chapter 4 provides the first empirical assessment of the pathways developed earlier in the book. It focuses on access to judicial remedy mechanisms, defined as any process initiated in the court of law. This chapter asks: how does confrontation shape governance outcomes in terms of access to legal remedy efforts? I draw from political science and legal scholarship on the logic of deterrence to illustrate how Institutional Strength represents an important pathway to judicial remedy mechanisms. The Corporate Characteristics pathway is developed by engaging with political economy and management scholarship to explain the ways in which firm-level characteristics (e.g. foreignness, profitability, and size) explain variation in access to judicial remedy. Finally, the Elevating Voices pathway draws from the human rights scholarship, which illustrates how civil society participation (e.g. NGO or INGO involvement) can shape governance outcomes. Using case studies from the CHRD, this chapter also provides rich illustrations of victims’ access to judicial remedy mechanisms.

Chapter 5 explores the same pathways but draws on different scholarship, as non-judicial remedy mechanisms represent a much broader set of administrative or mediation-based activities that can be initiated by state or non-state actors. The Institutional Strength pathway explores how rule of law influences access to non-judicial remedy. To inform the mechanisms that drive the Corporate Characteristics and Elevating Voices pathways, this chapter employs slack resource theory to explain why profitable firms might be more likely to engage in socially responsible practices, such as non-judicial remedy. This approach suggests that when firms have the slack, or extra resources to do good deeds, they will do so. Other scholars explore how firm size can also shape firm involvement in such activities; larger firms are more vulnerable to civil society pressure and, thus, may be more likely to engage in non-judicial remedy mechanisms. Detailed vignettes provide concrete illustrations of victims’ efforts to access to non-judicial remedy mechanisms.

The conclusion draws together the main themes discussed in the book, and briefly examines what happened after the end of the war, in 1815. Suddenly, with the decommissioning of the fleet, most (though not all) ‘foreign’ seamen were no longer needed, and many of them were reduced to beg in the streets. The utilitarian system of ‘pragmatic inclusiveness’ that had directed naval recruitment collapsed, and displacement was the trigger for legal and cultural forms of discrimination which had been suppressed by the Navy during the war. Thus, its exceptional bubble eventually burst. Different types of labels and demarcations, which had been treated as, and proven to be, utterly unimportant, all of a sudden became a convenient framework for both individuals and the state to harken onto, crystallising ‘foreign Jack Tars’ into a group. The legal categories that were twisted in one direction during wartime now further proved their flimsiness by being twisted in the opposite direction. Caught in between states, the same men who were previously wanted by all were now rejected by all.

The chapter examines literary translation as a fundamental part of Elizabeth Bishop’s creative effort and as a valuable context for the reading of her original works. It demonstrates how Bishop’s translations from several foreign languages (Ancient Greek, French, Portuguese, Spanish), which span a variety of genres (comedy, diary, short stories, lyric poetry, avant-garde prose poems, ballad, folk songs), and which she worked on throughout her career, relate to her own poetry’s topics, styles, poetic strategies, and language. Her views of translation are discussed in relation to her poetic principles, and it is suggested that translation as a creative stance exploring the complex interrelations between the foreign and the familiar is an essential principle underlying Bishop’s own poetics.

In this chapter I explore the lexicon of border-crossing and foreignness in Chaucer’s poetry and in late medieval England. In a period in which the borders of national territories were rarely firmly established, I explore how affiliation, language, and religion could be indices of belonging. I propose that, for those writing in fourteenth-century English the very definition of belonging and foreignness was measured in local, rather than national, terms, and borders – those symbols of modern colonialism and the nation-state – were almost always porous. Indeed, can we even think in terms of medieval borders when this was a world without formal borders? This essay asks us to consider whether crossing a border always equates to transgression, a change of identity, or an encounter with the Other, through discussions of Chaucer’s poetry, in particular the Knight’s Tale, the Man of Law’s Tale, the Prioress’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.