Introduction

Abstract

The face of a person is displayed on the cover of the last twentieth-century issue of New Writing, 8 (1999), the annual sample anthology of new writing published by Vintage in association with the British Council. The image is clearly a composite one, signalling a person partly North-West European, partly Indian, partly African, partly Asian. Peter Blake’s identikit image speaks very eloquently a message put into words in the introduction by editors Tibor Fischer and Lawrence Norfolk, when they rejoice in the state of Balkanisation in modern British literature. They have discovered a ‘new imaginative mobility’ in the capacity of British writers to take up subjects and themes of an outlandish nature with the result that ‘British writing today appears as effective when treating of Algiers or Ulan Bator as it always has been when dissecting the mores of the Shire Counties or the All Saints Road’ (Fischer and Norfolk, 1999:xiii). Writers’ Britain has become a ‘cultural entrepôt, a place of flux and reflux, differently but intricately connected to both Europe and the United States, historically and more problematically to the Indian subcontinent and Africa’ (ibid.). But also within Britain certain trends suggesting upheaval are discernible, since the balance is currently being shifted in favour of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, with England proper apparently lagging behind, judging by the proportion of regional contributions to New Writing, 8.

Hundreds of citizens have written to Tony Blair from every part of Britain urging that ‘God Save the Queen’ is replaced by a ‘more appropriate’ tune [for sports events]. ‘Their general opinion is “England, get your own national anthem; ‘God Save the Queen’ is a British song”’, explained a Downing Street insider.

(The Observer, 5 March 2000, News Section, p. 6)