ABSTRACT
This article analyses how the topography of various kinds of wartime camp are represented in British narratives. It does so in order to explore whether a specifically British experience or viewpoint is evident in these texts.
The camps under discussion include the internment camps, established from 1940 onwards on British soil for the incarceration of ‘enemy aliens’, and their representation in wartime memoirs and novels as well as in more recent fiction. The second category of camp to be analysed is that of the necessarily fictional deportation camp, imagined in recent novels to have been established in a Britain which has either been invaded or surrendered in 1940. Lastly, the terrain of the forced-labour and extermination camp at Auschwitz has appeared in recent British fiction in a way that draws on documentary sources by means of an anglophone perspective.
The article concludes by observing that, in each case, what might have seemed to be a comparison, drawing likenesses between the real or imagined British camp and those of occupied Europe, turns out rather to be a stark literary and moral contrast.
