Administrative Worlding: Paperealities and Bureaucratic 'Trompe L’oeil' in Fictional Representations of the British State

Abstract

In works of fiction dealing with state bureaucracy, administrative practices such as census-taking and map-making have often been portrayed as modes of world-building akin to novelistic writing. The ontological effects of administrative statecraft have also been observed in scholarship on state administration, but these effects have yet to be theorised as such. This article therefore delineates the concept of ‘administrative worlding,’ theorising administrative creativity and world-building in light of scholarship on literary worlds, before surveying how the ontology of bureaucracy is treated in selected works of British fiction. Administrative worlding is found to represent a central topos in narratives about British state bureaucracy from the eighteenth century to the present.