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Around 1945
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Around 1945

Literature, Citizenship, Rights
Edited by Allan Hepburn
Literary Theory & Criticism
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9780773599031

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How novels expanded human and legal rights in the age of the atomic bomb.


Near the end of the Second World War, new ideas about citizenship, national identity, belonging, and rights emerged as the atrocities of the war - coupled with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - spurred writers and citizens around the world to think about their responsibilities to their fellow man.

Covering British authors and contemporary fiction by migrant writers publishing at mid-century, as well as some photography from the era, Around 1945 is a collection of essays that reveals how literary texts and cultural events modeled human rights issues such as dignity, freedom, sovereignty, and responsibility. Unified by an investigation of the human and cultural aspects of universal rights, these essays show that British writers tested the parameters of citizenship and rights in novelistic form. By imagining duties and rights of citizens in hypothetical contexts, these novels expanded on the legislated entitlements and obligations that make up civic and human identity. To this day the repercussions of 1945 continue to unfold in stories about statehood, refugees, humanitarianism, displacement, and national belonging. At the same time, novels continue to imagine the human person, equal in rights and dignity before the law, yet often compromised by the political exigencies of nation-states that do not recognize legal, political, or human rights.

Tracing the rippling consequences of the Second World War from 1945 through the Cold War and into the present, Around 1945 is an extraordinarily rich volume that will alter our perception of pre- and post-war British literature.

Contributors include Nadine Attewell (McMaster), Mitchell C. Brown (Dalhousie), Matthew Hart (Columbia), Janice Ho (Colorado), Emily Hyde (Rowan), Peter Kalliney (Kentucky), Marina MacKay (Oxford), Melanie Micir (Washington, St. Louis), Adam Piette (Sheffield) Claire Seiler (Dickinson College), and Ian Whittington (Mississippi).
Details

328 Pages, 6 x 9

7 b&w photos

ISBN 9780773547322

May 2016

Formats: Cloth, Paperback, eBook

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“Around 1945 is an exceptionally strong and carefully curated set of essays that will have a very receptive audience among scholars of modern and contemporary literature and culture.” Thomas Davis, Ohio State University
“The eclectic grouping of essays contained in Around 1945 makes for an exciting addition to the growing field of scholarship on relations between literary production and governmental practice across the twentieth century.” Times Literary Supplement
Allan Hepburn is James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University.
CONTENTS


Acknowledgments vii
Illustrations ix

Introduction 3
ALLAN HEPBURN


PART ONE: CITIZENS

1 Citizenship and the English Novel in 1945 29
MARINA MACKAY

2 “A Rather Ungoverned Bringing Up”: Postwar Resistance and
Displacement in The World My Wilderness 48
IAN WHITTINGTON

3 Not of National Importance: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Women’s
Work, and the Mid-Century Historical Novel 66
MELANIE MICIR

4 Citizens of World Photography 84
EMILY HYDE


PART TWO: VIOLATIONS

5 The Human and the Citizen in Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent 107
JANICE HO

6 Interventions: Haiti, Humanitarianism, and The Girls
of Slender Means 129
ALLAN HEPBURN

7 Torture, Text, Human Rights: Beckett’s Comment c’est / How It Is
and the Algerian War 151
ADAM PIETTE

8 Fictions of the Human in Postwar Japan 175
CLAIRE SEILER


PART THREE: RIGHTS

9 Human Rights and Postwar Internationalism in
The Third Man 197
MITCHELL C. BROWN

10 Loving Revolutions: Reading Mixed Race at Mid-Century 216
NADINE ATTEWELL

11 Confessional Fictions: Truth and Reconciliation in
the Cold War 240
PATER KALLINEY

12 Writing Like a State: On Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners 262
MATTHEW HART


Works Cited 279
Contributors 301
Index 305
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