If, as Peter Gatrell has suggested, the figure of the refugee was defined and even constructed during the twentieth century, then the Second World War was a crucial period in this process (Gatrell, 2013). This article looks at three representations of refugee figures from this period, Graham Greene's novel The Name of Action (1930), Rebecca West's short story ‘Around Us the Wail of Sirens’ (1941) and Storm Jameson's novel The Black Laurel (1947), evaluating them in light of recent scholarship around hospitality and asylum to suggest that these refugee characters subvert the norms and customs of British hospitality. It argues that in these three texts, refugees act as ‘threshold figures’, exposing the realities of war and the inadequacy of British social processes to contain them. In doing so, they point towards a different way of representing the refugee as an active agent, rather than a passive recipient in both political processes and social interactions.

中文翻译：

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门槛上的数字：难民和好客政治，1930-51

如果正如彼得·加特雷尔 (Peter Gatrell) 所建议的那样，难民的形象是在 20 世纪定义甚至构建的，那么第二次世界大战是这一过程中的一个关键时期 (Gatrell, 2013)。本文着眼于这一时期难民人物的三种表现形式，格雷厄姆·格林的小说《行动之名》（1930 年）、丽贝卡·韦斯特的短篇小说《在我们周围，警报声》（1941 年）和风暴詹姆森的小说《黑桂冠》（1947 年），根据最近关于好客和庇护的奖学金对他们进行评估，以表明这些难民角色颠覆了英国好客的规范和习俗。它认为，在这三个文本中，难民充当了“门槛人物”，暴露了战争的现实以及英国社会进程在遏制它们方面的不足。在这样做，