ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. English modernism is more anxious about than modernity and modernization, which is perhaps what makes the term English modernism' almost contradictory and forces it into inverted commas. English-language modernism, when it engages with modernity, often seems to question Englishness', and vice versa. 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. If the modernist German discourse revises more sympathetic nineteenth-century attitudes, in response to a historically specific crisis of Englishness; in other words, English modernism often articulates the problematics of national identity through representations of Germans. If for Conrad modernity amounted to a traumatic loss for which the Germans became a melancholic catalyst, his Edwardian contemporaries would find even more reasons to meet them with suspicion.
