The relationship between literature and the state has seen increased attention in recent criticism, with the work of such political theorists as Giorgio Agamben, Benedict Anderson, and Hannah Arendt grounding new modes of literary inquiry. Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights, edited by Allan Hepburn, brings together a body of work on a variety of literary and cultural texts that demonstrates the rich potential literature holds to reveal the complexities of human rights and state interventions into human life. Following the lead of critics like Patricia Chu (Race, Nationalism and the State [2006]) and Jed Esty (A Shrinking Island [2003], Unseasonable Youth [2013]), this transnational collection plots points of connection among twentieth-century state practices, aesthetic form, and social and cultural constructions of identity and rights.

In his informative introduction, Hepburn details the ways in which 1945 serves as “an organizing, even gravitational, point for questions about citizenship and rights,” at and around which the manifold consequences of the Second World War began to take effect. Near this date, Hepburn demonstrates, “thinking about citizenship moved away from national expressions of rights towards the universal applicability of rights” (3). Indeed, the tension that Hannah Arendt emphasizes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968) between the increasing international efforts to legislate human rights (represented, of course, most centrally in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948) and state sovereignty plays a central role in many of the essays collected here. What effect in the world can “human rights” have if individual states determine to whom they are granted? This question forms the locus of the collection, pursued though accounts of a number of texts of different genres and national origins. While the individual essays “constellate around citizenship and rights in British literature and culture at mid-century” (7), the collection has global tendencies and expansive temporal boundaries. It includes discussions of geopolitical developments from the early twentieth-century Aliens Acts in Britain (1905, 1919) to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (established 1996) formed to grapple with the infinitely complicated question of culpability after Apartheid in South Africa. The diversity of topics occasionally strains at the collection's parameters and threatens to render it diffuse, but together the essays demonstrate the great potential for continued illuminating critical work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural texts and what Michel Foucault calls “governmentality.”

The first section, “Citizens,” reads novels and photographs in the context of changes in the administration and definition of citizens in the immediate postwar period. Marina McKay contends that conservative fiction by Evelyn Waugh, Angela Thirkell, Henry Green, and others protests the impositions of the postwar welfare state as unnecessary continuations of wartime restrictions. Ian Whittington reads Rose Macauley's postwar England as an unfit space for individuals whose affiliations and identities had been shaped and distorted by the pressures of the war, and Melanie Micir considers Sylvia Townsend Warner's understudied novel about fourteenth-century nuns, The Corner that Held Them (1948), as a commentary on and challenge to the treatment of marginalized female and queer subjects during the war. Emily Hyde locates the potential for open-ended interactions in Edward Steichen's 1955 photography exhibition Family of Man, despite its bad reputation as ideological and sentimental.

Each of the chapters in the second section, “Violations,” “sets one sort of citizenship against another in a violent situation” (24). Janice Ho's fascinating essay reads the character Stevie in The Secret Agent (1907) through the lenses of biopower and the sentimental tradition as a “a literary reconfiguration of the relation between the corporeal body and the practice of politics” (119). The section includes fine pieces by Hepburn on Muriel Spark, temporality and intervention; Adam Piette on Beckett's Comment C'est and the hypocrisy of the French colonial state in the wake of the European Declaration of Human Rights; and Claire Seiler on representations of commemoration in postwar Japan by Kazuo Ishiguro and Shirley Hazzard.

The third section interrogates the problem of rights more explicitly, concentrating on the absence of rights in international and (post)colonial spaces, the political and emotional perils of living mixed-race at mid-century, and the substandard status of the black British citizen over centuries of imperialism and immigration. Many of the strongest pieces here and elsewhere in the collection highlight the relationship between geopolitical formations and experiments with literary form. Matthew Hart, for example, argues that Caryl Phillips's Foreigners demonstrates what it might look like to “write like a state,” or delimit the representation of a subject to his encounters with institutions. Both Peter Kalliney and Adam Piette consider, in the dynamics of scenes of confession and torture set in colonial and postcolonial Africa, respectively, the multivalenced production of knowledge, ideology, and culpability in these interactive forms. Several essays, Hart's included, provide intriguing explorations of the construction of race within institutional categories and in lived social life. Nadine Attewell, for example, draws on affect theory and political history to contend that domestic and social dynamics in Chinese-European writer Han Suyin's writings display “the difficulty of knowing to what extent our feelings are our own” (236).

While the “around” of the title is a generous term, the particular events of 1945 and the subsequent focus on international human rights in the context of tightening state restrictions cast a long shadow on individuals' encounters with state power, competing historical narratives, and identity formation. Literature, as Hepburn points out, provides an invaluable arena in which to understand the personal and social consequences of the ways in which states makes subjects, as it “imaginatively configures social relations among individuals” and “traces the dynamic process by which individuals identify the limits and freedoms inherent in citizenship within a community” (4). This valuable collection illuminates the complex interplay between aesthetic and legislative constructions of identity and social life.