Rex Ferguson is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature, Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham. For fuller accounts of the arguments found in this foreword see Rex Ferguson, Identification Practices in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) and Rex Ferguson, Melissa Littlefield and James Purdon, eds., The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2021).