Citizenship in Mid-Century British Literature

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Mid-century British novels are at their most inventive when they create hypothetical scenarios about citizenship: citizen-soldiers, world citizens, citizens of the future, or atomic citizens threatened with nuclear extinction. The inauguration of the welfare state after the Second World War liberated novelists to think about civic responsibility and statehood in innovative ways, as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955), Ian Fleming’s Dr No (1957), Muriel Spark’s Robinson (1958), and Anthony Burgess’s Devil of a State (1961). With the Second World War and nuclear catastrophe in mind, novelists speculate on how states come into existence, how long they last, and what causes them to fail. 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 all pose challenges to the idea of statehood and who counts as a good citizen.</jats:p>