The present article expounds a synthetic perspective on the paradigmatic themes and discourses characterising the postcolonial novel cultivated in Britain by such bicultural metropolitan writers as V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, whose writings treat of the complex historical, political, social and cultural quandaries arising in the wake of the former British Empire. Their texts are shown to have preceded and informed the key critical paradigms at the core of postcolonial theory and criticism and to have significantly contributed to the crystallisation of the theoretical domain of postcolonial studies or of such interdisciplinary areas as cultural and ethnic criticism. The overview of their work undertaken in the article also highlights the centrality of concepts and discourses of globalization, global citizenship, cultural hybridity and trans-national identity - phenomena seen as originating in the sweeping geopolitical changes of the postcolonial era of mass migration and global hybridisations.
