ABSTRACT
Culture is the heart of national identity, as Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities showed. A nation is too huge to be a real community in which everyone actually knows each other. Instead, nations are produced in the imagination by concepts, narratives, memories and traditions: that is, through the work of culture. Reflecting on the powers of literature, Bryan Cheyette offers an autobiographical reflection on a kind of migrancy into literature and literary studies and the role of a migrant's perspective for writers and critics. No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. This Brexit discourse is no friend to creative, cosmopolitan literature nor to attentive and responsive literary scholarship: people oppose it. That said, an academic book of literary essays is not much and, as John Donne points out, a little 'clod' is easily 'washed away by the sea'.
