The relationship between realistic fiction and the modern nation emerges from the novel’s claim to supersede traditional epic narratives. However, it was not until the later twentieth century that this relationship was subjected to intense critical scrutiny. In nineteenth-century Europe, Walter Scott’s historical romance led to the realism of novelists such as Balzac and Tolstoy combining contemporaneity with an increasingly disillusioned critique of social and national history. After examining the representation of the nation in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, this chapter turns to the portrayal of postcolonial nationhood in the Icelandic realist Halldór Laxness. The degree of cultural and geographical isolation reflected in Laxness’s Independent People was changed irreversibly by twentieth-century warfare and the subsequent worldwide movements of peoples, as themes of exile, colonial self-division, and hybrid identity came to the fore. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North with its exploration of divided loyalties and clashes between cultures illustrates the ever more fluid relationship between literary cosmopolitanism and national identities.