The last two chapters focused on literary movements whose genesis was explicitly linked to broader efforts to confront the enduring legacies of imperialism and modernity. The novel form, crucial to the conceptualization of national identities in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, is appropriated by writers from marginalized groups in the second half of the twentieth century as a means of representing and recasting experiences largely effaced by endorsed histories and canonical literary texts of the First World. The self-conscious use of nostalgia to refigure experiences of the past is apparent not only in Caribbean and Native American novels discussed in the previous two chapters, however, but also in literary works composed throughout the contemporary Anglophone world. Indeed, the longing for lost or imagined homelands has been a central feature of novels written in England as much as it has been in its former colonies; as Great Britain has had to confront the decline of its Empire and the vast influx of refugees from the colonial peripheries, literature has provided a medium for exploring questions of Englishness and the future of the nation.