Melissa M. Littlefield

Rex Ferguson

James Purdon

Since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a notable acceleration in the development of the techniques used to confirm identity. From fingerprints to photographs to DNA, we have been rapidly amassing novel means of identification, even as personal, individual identity remains a complex chimera. The Art of Identification examines how such processes are entangled within a wider sphere of cultural identity formation. Against the backdrop of an unstable modernity and the rapid rise and expansion of identificatory techniques, this volume makes the case that identity and identification are mutually imbricated and that our best understanding of both concepts and technologies comes through the interdisciplinary analysis of science, bureaucratic infrastructures, and cultural artifacts. With contributions from literary critics, cultural historians, scholars of film and new media, a forensic anthropologist, and a human bioarcheologist, this book reflects upon the relationship between the bureaucratic, scientific, and technologically determined techniques of identification and the cultural contexts of art, literature, and screen media. In doing so, it opens the interpretive possibilities surrounding identification and pushes us to think about it as existing within a range of cultural influences that complicate the precise formulation, meaning, and reception of the concept. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Dorothy Butchard, Patricia E. Chu, Jonathan Finn, Rebecca Gowland, Liv Hausken, Matt Houlbrook, Rob Lederer, Andrew Mangham, Victoria Stewart, and Tim Thompson.

Forensics, Surveillance, Identity

The Art of Identification

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 have 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 practiced in the UK and US in the long 20th 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 re-assessment 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 the disciplines of English Literature, History, and Cultural Studies.

Rex Ferguson

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