The preoccupation with pastoral images observed in the last chapter among both so-called English and immigrant authors living in Britain suggests a collective dimension to the imagination rarely apparent in the white South African fiction discussed in chapter 2. As we saw earlier, Brink, Coetzee, and Gordimer sought in the imagination an epistemological faculty that could counter the mystification of reality produced by state propaganda, thereby enabling individuals to feel sympathy with others. Yet all three authors were highly conscious of the dangers in claiming that they or their readers could vicariously experience what it meant to be black in South Africa. All three understood the necessity for the imagination to function as a social practice rather than an individual pursuit divorced from everyday life, even though the notion of the imagination bridging social divides or healing social tensions remained a heuristic rather than a genuine possibility in their fictional works. In contrast, the contemporary British authors discussed in chapter 3 repeatedly sought in a revised notion of Englishness the possibility of bridging ethnic, racial, and cultural divides. Rejecting the notion of cultural identity as a fixed set of categories or traits, these authors assigned the imagination a crucial role in the production, revision, and negotiation of Englishness.