ABSTRACT
It is time to cast aside the long-fashionable periodization of twentieth-century British literature into two discrete units: the high modernist works produced in and around the 1920s, and everything that followed. This increasingly arbitrary seeming division of the century into two unequal portions obscures the many common thematic concerns and generic ties that bind literature produced across the century. While rethinking the periodization of the century, we must also be attentive to the challenges to homogeneous models of national identity that underwrite literary historiography. Britain has been a particularly leaky container for much of the twentieth century, with its supra-national identity as a globespanning empire giving way to a devolved assemblage of fractious small nations on the edge of a highly disunited Europe. Notwithstanding these forms of contestations, as the worldwide appeal of the BBC suggests, Britishness was an important category of cultural identity and institutional production for much of the century.
