Citizenship in Mid-Century British Literature War, Statehood, Extinction

A common thread in mid-century British novels is citizenship, a problematic concept that took cues from the imperatives of civic responsibility that arose during the Second World War and persisted through the innovative programs of the welfare state. From George Orwell to Mary Renault and William Golding, authors liberated themselves from the parameters of actual states and created hypothetical scenarios about citizenship: citizen-soldiers, world citizens, citizens of the future, or nuclear citizens threatened with atomic bombs and possible extinction. In Citizenship in Mid-Century British Literature, Allan Hepburn explores the ways novelists speculated about how states come into existence, how long they last, and what causes them to fail or disappear. Hepburn's analysis integrates critical points in twentieth-century British history, such as the internment of aliens in the Second World War, the arrival of racialized citizens in the UK after 1948, and the exclusion of queer people from the presumptively heterosexual state. Through history and fiction, Citizenship in Mid-Century British Literature ponders the idea of statehood and who counts as a good citizen.

Allan Hepburn, James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, Department of English, McGill University

Allan Hepburn is James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University. He is the author of Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (2005), Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Literature (2010), and A Grain of Faith: Religion in Mid-Century British Literature (2018). He has published sixty essays on diverse topics and edited nine books, the most recent of which are Friendship and the Novel (2024) and Elizabeth Bowen in Context (2026). He edits the MacLennan Poetry series at McGill-Queen's University Press and co-edits the Oxford Mid-Century Studies series at Oxford University Press.