Anti-State Fantasy and the Fiction of the 1940s

Abstract

This essay argues that the wartime institutionalisation of emergency governmental powers and the expectation of their continuance under a post-war socialist administration led to a pervasive anti-statism indistinguishable from anti-Communism in the mid-century British novel. Focusing on less-read dystopias of the period, Rex Warner's The Aerodrome (1941) and C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength (1945), I argue that these conservative novels are best understood as extreme iterations of a more widespread anxiety about the potentially totalitarian elements of a centralising and technocratic democracy at war.