The period immediately following World War II is now well known for the migration to the United Kingdom of a large number of writers and artists from a fast-declining empire. Lured to the once-imperial metropolis to find publishers and a wider audience for their work, many were to have a major impact on the face of British writing as the century progressed. Yet, few attempts were made to include them in post-war accounts of British literary history. Moreover, the pigeonholes that were eventually set up either excluded them on grounds of race, placing them neatly in separate national traditions, or partially assimilated them as the ‘exotic’ flowers of what came by the 1960s to be known as ‘Commonwealth Literature’: a so-called wave of ‘new’ writings in English from previously colonised areas but which were frequently reduced by well-meaning liberal critics to simply derivative or mimicking branches of the main. There were, of course, several reasons for this. Not only had the critical temper of British writing become narrowly parochial (with a loss of interest in the cosmopolitanism characteristic of the Modernist movement earlier in the century), but it was still fuelled, even after Independence, by the lingering ideologies of a three-hundred-year imperial history, the divisive legacies of a manichean colonialist discourse which failed to accept that the formation of the nation was not only built on the culture of empire but also created by it. Domestic ideas of the national character had always been buoyed up by a process of exclusion, where what was British was defined in contradistinction to those it regarded to be the nation’s ‘others’, whether at home or abroad.