Identification Practices in Twentieth-Century Fiction

The task of identifying the individual has given rise to a number of technical innovations, including fingerprint analysis and DNA profiling. A range of methods has also been created for storing and classifying people’s identities, such as identity cards and digital records. Identification Practices and Twentieth-Century Fiction tests the hypothesis that these techniques and methods, as practised in the UK and US in the long twentieth century, are inherently related to the literary representation of self-identity from the same period. Until now, the question of ‘who one is’ in the sense of formal identification has remained detached from the question of ‘who one is’ in terms of the representation of unique individuality. Placing these two questions in dialogue allows for a re-evaluation of the various ways in which uniqueness has been constructed during the period and for a reassessment of the historical and literary historical context of such construction. In chapters ranging across the development of fingerprinting, the institution of identity cards during the Second World War, DNA profiling and contemporary digital surveillance, and an analysis of writing by authors including Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, J. G. Ballard, Don DeLillo, and Jennifer Egan, Identification Practices and Twentieth-Century Fiction makes an original contribution to Literary Studies, History, and Cultural Studies.

Fictions of Time and Space

This essay argues for a fuller recognition of the key transitional status of The Four-Gated City (1969) in Doris Lessing’s career. As an attempt to recalibrate the basic coordinates of the realist inheritance, the novel develops a strongly spatial narrative mode that coincides with a desire to write a utopian collective. This is confirmed both by previously unstudied draft material for Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and the published texts that followed. However, in The Four-Gated City this attempt to break from the destructive globalization of the postwar era becomes deeply problematic through its handling of history and time. Examining this struggle in Lessing’s writing can shed light on how the interplay of space and time informs the intertwined histories of realism and modernism in twentieth-century fiction, and on how Lessing’s work contributes to current debates about possible futures for the novel.