Allan Hepburn

Bio

Allan Hepburn is James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University. He is the author of Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (2005) and Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Literature (2010). In addition, he has edited three volumes of works by Elizabeth Bowen: short stories, essays, and broadcasts. A fourth volume, dedicated to Bowen’s book reviews, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. His edited volume of essays, entitled Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Human Rights, is available from McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is in the final stretches of writing a monograph about faith in British culture during and after the Second World War.

Contributions

Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War by Rachel Bryan

From the Print Journal

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press Briony Tallis, the irksome thirteen-year-old writer in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), ruins the lives of her sister, Cecilia, and, to an even greater degree, Robbie Turner, by telling a lie. Because of Briony’s untruthfulness, Robbie goes to prison, then to France at the start of the Second World War, where he dies of septicaemia on the beach at Dunkirk. During her decades-long writing career, Briony creates several stories about what happened between...

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review war

The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Thomas S. Davis

Print Plus Exclusive

A brilliant and timely book, The Extinct Scene joins the growing list of scholarly works that deal with Anglo-British modernism in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999), Marina MacKay’s Modernism and World War II (2007), Leo Mellor’s Reading the Ruins (2011), Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters (2013), and Gill Plain’s Literature of the 1940s (2013). These works establish continuities from the interwar years through the Second World War and into the era of British decolonization.

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late modernism