Introduction

Devoting an issue of Interactions to the role of female voices in the construction of fictional maps of contemporary Britain stems from the need to document the work of diasporic-transnational women writers who over the last decades have drawn new contours of literary Britain. The work of women writers of dual or multiple cultural heritages in Britain contributes to the positioning of English literature at a cultural crossroads of international scope and significance. As writers responding to and incorporating their dual cultural heritage in their writing, often across a variety of genres and media, women writers have managed to chart new geographies of (un)belonging, "rewriting the metropolis" (McLeod), as well as the whole of the country, from a gendered perspective as a multicultural physical and imagined space.