Research Catalog

Title

Around 1945 : literature, citizenship, rights / edited by Allan Hepburn.

Publication

Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Hepburn, Allan

Description

x, 313 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• "Around 1945 examines an issue that preoccupied social and political thinkers at mid-century and that has resonance still: Who is a citizen and on what grounds is citizenship defined? The volume attempts to articulate some of the complexities that inform the relation between citizenship and human rights in light of a reconsideration of citizenship and rights that occurred in the postwar era. Literary texts and cultural events model problems of rights, such as dignity, freedom, sovereignty, and responsibility. These essays are unified by an investigation of the human and cultural aspects of universal rights."--
• "The dilemmas of citizenship were especially acute right after the Second World War. Refugees and stateless people had no human rights protections because they had no national citizenship. Countries further refined the entitlements of citizens according to perceived degrees of belonging. The term "Commonwealth citizen," for instance, was first used in the British Nationality Act 1948 to designate a person with limited number of civil rights, in contradistinction to a "British citizen," who had full civil rights and liberties. At the same time, citizenship assumed international dimensions, especially after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948, which promises world citizenship for "all members of the human family." Around 1945 traces questions of citizenship and rights through literary, photographic, and cinematic examples. Novels are a particularly fertile genre for modelling the hanging obligations of citizenship because they represent conflict and change through time; novelistic plots incarnate rights through characters and events. Many of the chapters in this volume focus on novels, although others find other generic formations more amenable to the problems of citizenship, such as the notebook, the documentary, the confession, and the melodrama. These essays trace the rippling consequences of the Second World War from 1945 through the Cold War and into the present."--

Subjects

• Literature and society
• English fiction
• Law in literature
• English fiction > 20th century > History and criticism
• Literature and society > Great Britain > History > 20th century
• Citizenship in literature
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Human rights in literature
• 1900-1999
• Great Britain
• History

Genre/Form

• Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• History.

Note

• "The essays in this collection derive from a two-day colloquium, entitled "Literature, Citizenship, Rights," held at McGill University on 21 22 August 2014. That event was made possible by generous support from a Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture (FRQSC) research grant dedicated to research on the novel."--Acknowledgments.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Additional Formats (note)

• Issued also in electronic format.

Call Number

JFE 16-8582

ISBN

• 9780773547315
• 0773547312
• 9780773547322
• 0773547320

OCLC

932386912

Title

Around 1945 : literature, citizenship, rights / edited by Allan Hepburn.

Publisher

Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Additional Formats

Issued also in electronic format.

Chronological Term

1900-1999

Added Author

Hepburn, Allan, author, editor.

Other Form:

Around 1945 (CaOONL)2016900239X

Research Call Number

JFE 16-8582