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This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.

The introductory chapter is divided into two sections: the first one, focusing on roots, is a review of Arabic-language Lebanese war literature of the 1970s and 1980s, its main authors, and trends, with some references to Francophone Lebanese literature; the second one, focusing on routes, is an overview of post-war Anglophone literature as a phenomenon of the last fourteen years. It explains why and how, emerging a few years after peace had been achieved in Lebanon in 1990, these narratives display a newer version of ‘survivor memory’, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, in the form of a generation-specific consciousness, one alternatively replete with irony, parody, nostalgia, and critiques of self and nation. It focuses on the cross-cultural aspect of these texts in two ways: on these authors' views on writing in a foreign language; and on several critics' observations on the increased diversification of Lebanese literature. Drawing on theories of transnational literatures, it argues that these novels characterise a new literary and cultural phenomenon, and have founded what is predicted to become a fuller-fledged branch of Lebanese diasporic literature. By questioning home from a spatial and a temporal distance, these texts offer different visions of ‘Lebaneseness’ in the twenty-first century.

The Introduction of Writing Human Rights provides a historical overview of the international and domestic postwar contexts in which an international human rights regime was established, as it distinguishes human rights from liberal humanitarianism. It focuses on Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a watershed novel for theorizing human rights at the end of the “American century.”

Examining the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Chapter One tracks how, in the final years of the Cold War, authors such as Ernest Gaines and Maxine Hong Kingston re-membered transnational forms of Afro-Asian solidarity that laid claim to the right to self determination, as well as social and economic rights.

The conclusion contrasts two literary institutions - the Booker Prize and the Caribbean Artists Movement - to reflect on the difference between postcolonial literature and global literature in English. There are fine but important differences between these two categories, most noticeable in the types of cultural institutions associated with them. Both the Caribbean Artists Movement and the Booker Prize emerged in the late-1960s, attempting to capitalize on the surge of interest in writing from former British colonies. Their different methods of promoting their interests, this chapter argues, can tell us a great deal about the ultimate fate of modernist writing in the contemporary era.

Chapter Two reads the novels A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee and Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn alongside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to describe the seemingly impossible political subjects that might be granted standing, or the fundamental “right to have rights,” in a transnational human rights imaginary.

Evincing a transnational feminist account of women’s revolutionary politics in the novels of Julia Alvarez, Chapter Four recasts what it means to posit “women’s rights as human rights,” especially with regards to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

The Conclusion describes how the construction of the child as a human rights subject in the Convention on the Rights of the Child insists upon a human right to family, which in turn animates an “aesthetics of kin” in minor literatures, such as Aimeee Phan’s short story collection We Should Never Meet.

Considering the family romance and family saga as adapted in narrative fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri and Ana Castillo, in tandem with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Chapter Five argues for a conception of the right to health that recognizes embodied vulnerability as the core feature of human being.

Examining poetical exchanges between James VI of Scotland and the Huguenot courtier Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas in the 1580s, Chapter 7 demonstrates how poetry contributed to diplomatic initiatives, and how diplomatic concerns fostered expressiveness in the composition and presentation of poems. Early modern poetry, especially poetry in translation, could contribute to building better international cultural relations. Ambassadors and elite political figures were sometimes involved in such poems as writers, translators, readers, dedicatees, or recipients. When they were, these poems could contain subtle gestures consistent with the cultural diplomatic aims to express shared identity and strengthen political ties. The poetic exchanges between James and Du Bartas in the 1580s contained many signals of the common literary and political culture in Scotland and Protestant France, signals that are found in the subject matter, prosody, diction, structure, and other poetic features of the verses that they exchanged. This chapter examines the poetic techniques that James and Du Bartas used for expressing cultural convergence between Scotland and France when translating and composing original verse for each other, and then shows how the print publication of their poems enabled a broader international community to participate in this cultural moment.

Chapter Three examines Susan Choi’s novel The Foreign Student and the UN Convention Against Torture together to educe a formulation of the “right to the security of person.” It demonstrates how the right to human security deconstructs the sovereign state authority by which war and torture “work over” the vulnerable body in pain.