English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890-1950

《英国现代主义，民族认同和德国人，1890-1950》是第一本理论知识丰富的专著，系统地研究了这一时期“德国性”的建构。我主要关注的是严格意义上的文学文本，这些文本的作者既包括经典作家，也包括讨论不足的作家（如康拉德、巴肯、冯·阿尼姆、萨基、福特、伍尔夫、福斯特、劳伦斯、伊舍伍德、史密斯、鲍文），但我也会考虑到语境化的其他来源（宣传材料、杂志文学、指南书、新闻、漫画）。现代主义似乎见证了德国人从维多利亚时代博学有文化的表亲到20世纪初好战的条顿人的转变，但这种转变不能简单地归结为战争的影响，也不是普遍的。的确，就在两国最交战的时候，文化和政治上的相似之处以不可思议的持久性重新出现在那个时期的文学和文化中。德国人形象的变化通常不是对战争等实际历史或政治事件的反应，而是对这些事件对英国人本质的影响的预测。因此，德语结构的变化必然反映了英国人对不确定的未来的焦虑，对不可靠的现在的不满，以及对过去的文化不安。德国民族身份的形象往往是不确定的投射，是对英国特性的渴望，这种投射坚持差异性和神话，以确认两个国家之间的明显差异，而这两个国家却奇怪地彼此熟悉。在某种程度上，现代主义德国话语修正了19世纪更令人同情的态度，它这样做是为了回应历史上特定的英国性危机（正如马斯特曼、福特、福斯特和奥威尔关于英国性的著作所证明的那样）；换句话说，英国现代主义经常通过对德国人的表现来阐明民族认同的问题。这个项目不是对当时文学反映或塑造的民族刻板印象和文化偏见进行调查式的分析，而是对德国他者在问题时期英国性建设中的必要性进行批判性反思。这种依赖并不总是受制于代理，但可能是一个更无意识的，甚至是不可思议的过程的一部分。事实上，现代主义对德国特性的描述中，许多潜在的修辞都是基于对熟悉的否认，一种对潜在的过于亲密的关系的字面上的“陌生感”。然而，作为身份形成基础的压抑、投射和认同的精神分析动力学并不是在真空中发生的：它们反过来受到文化实践和历史发展的制约，被意识形态或社会制度所利用，并被随后的记忆和遗忘模式所混淆。这个项目，然后，检查身份形成的复杂性，反映和指导（主要）文学美学从精神分析，历史主义的角度来看。本专著分为四部分，每部分两章：帝国与飞地；第一次世界大战及其小说；身体与性；支离破碎的国家：闪电战、叛国罪和碎石旅游。个别章节主要按时间顺序处理现代主义作家，而四部分结构在主题上突出了现代主义文化中特别焦虑的时刻，以及它们如何影响国家认同的构建。正如支持案例所表明的那样，这本书的连贯性体现在章节和章节之间的主题呼应中，这些章节和章节不同地涉及帝国、旅行、浪漫、背叛、性、间谍和战争。

English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890-1950 is the first theoretically-informed monograph that systematically examines the construction of 'Germanness' in this period. I primarily focus on strictly literary texts by canonical as well as under-discussed authors (such as Conrad, Buchan, von Arnim, Saki, Ford, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Isherwood, Smith, Bowen), but I also take into account other sources for contextualisation (propaganda material, magazine literature, guide books, journalism, caricatures).Modernism appears to witness a transition in the view of Germans from the learned and cultured cousin of Victorian times to the belligerent Teuton of the early twentieth-century, but this shift cannot simply be reduced to the effects of war nor is it universal. Indeed, just when the nations are at their most belligerent, cultural and political similarities resurface with uncanny persistence in the literature and culture of the period. And the image of the German changes often not in response to actual historical or political events such as war, but in anticipation of what these events might mean for the nature of Englishness. Therefore the shifting construction of Germanness is necessarily a reflection of specifically English anxieties about an uncertain future, discontents with an unreliable present and moments of cultural unease about the past. Images of German national identity are often uncertain projections of desired otherness to Englishness, projections that insist on alterity and myth in order to confirm a distinct difference between two nations strangely familiar with each other. To the extent to which the modernist German discourse revises more sympathetic nineteenth-century attitudes, it does so in response to a historically specific crisis of Englishness (as demonstrated in the writings on Englishness by Masterman, Ford, Forster and Orwell); in other words, English modernism often articulates the problematics of national identity through representations of Germans.Rather than present a survey-like analysis of national stereotypes and cultural prejudice reflected in or shaped by the literature of the time, this project offers a critical reflection on the necessity of the German other for the construction of Englishness for the period in question. This dependence is by no means always subject to agency but may be part of a more unconscious, even uncanny process. Indeed, much of the underlying rhetoric in modernist representations of Germanness is based on a denial of familiarity, a literal 'making strange' of potentially too intimate relations. However, the psychoanalytic dynamics of repression, projection and identification that underlie identity formation do not happen in a vacuum: they are in turn conditioned by cultural practices and historical developments, utilised by ideologies or social institutions, and obfuscated by subsequent modes of remembering and forgetting. This project, then, examines the complexity of identity formation as reflected in and steered by (mostly) literary aesthetics from a psychoanalytically informed, historicist perspective. The monograph is divided into four parts with two chapters each: Empire and Enclaves; the Great War and Its Fictions; the Body and Sexuality; Fragmented Nations: Blitz, Treason and Rubble Tourism. The individual chapters deal with modernist writers largely in chronological order, while the four-part structure thematically highlights specifically anxious moments of modernist culture and how they affect constructions of national identity. As the case for support demonstrates, the book's coherence is manifest in the thematic echoes between sections and chapters that variously touch on empire, travel, romance, betrayal, sexuality, espionage, and war.