Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel

Abstract

Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel charts how novelists imagined changing forms of citizenship in twentieth-century Britain. This study offers a new way of understanding the constitution of the nation-state in terms of the concept of citizenship. Through close readings, it reveals how major authors such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, and Monica Ali presented political struggles over citizenship during key historical moments: the advent of democracy, the emancipation of women, the rise of social-welfare provision, the institution of the security state during World War II, and the emergence of multicultural citizenship during postwar immigration. This serves as the first full-length monograph to map the interrelations between literary production and public debates about citizenship that shaped Britain in the twentieth century.