Early on in the process of developing this essay collection, an alternate title of John Buchan and the Modern World was mooted. This title remained in place for some months. However, as the essays neared completion, we felt that they and thus the book were about far more than John Buchan's writing and work passively reflecting his place in a modernizing world. On the contrary, the focus of the book had taken an ideological turn. It had become about Buchan and the idea of modernity. The volume now registered Buchan's complex understanding not only of the/his modern world (that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), but of certain key concepts of modernity, and processes of modernization, by which that world was underpinned. Moreover, the essays charted how these concepts determined Buchan's novels and essays; showed how his writing steered a course through middlebrow cultures linked to, but not coincident with, that of his modernist peers; and engaged with Buchan's self-questioning accounts of various epistemological and ontological modernities, and of the discursive structures they informed. The Buchan that had emerged, in other words, was no simple adventure novelist or naïve imperialist, but one fundamentally attuned to the moral, political, religious, socio-cultural, philosophical, and racial ambiguities of his time.

The ‘idea’ of modernity has meant (and still means) different things to different people.