Abstract: British writers’ personal writings are inseparable from the construction of the British national identity. The construction of the British national identity is at once an internal and external process, in which the “Other” is both the subject and object of imagining. Early British writers’ art and political expression in imagining the “Other” produced a “skin of the nation” fit for the body of the empire. The British literary writings that are primarily intended for imagining the “Other” facilitated the epistemic violence against and the demonization of the “Other” so as to accomplish the purpose of establishing the British national identity with the force gleaned from the “Other”. During the final phase of the British Empire and the postcolonial period, modern and contemporary British diasporic writers, who wrote with an identity of the “Other”, one that differs from a native British, employed, respectively, the medieval concepts of knighthood and the methods of neo-historical cultural criticism in an attempt to construct Britain as the“fairy queen”who needs protection and the theme park of multiculturalism.

Key words: modern and contemporary British diaspora literature, national identity, the Other, imagination, culture