Even a cursory look at Sri Lanka's immediate pre-independence and post-independence history reveals a singular lack of a pan-Sri Lankan identity. Two significant nationalisms have emerged in post-independence Sri Lanka, Sinhala and Tamil. These Nationalisms have been locked in, what Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake (1999) calls a ‘bi-polar debate' which leaves little space to discuss alternative and inclusive conceptions of nationhood. This paper examines this lack of an inclusive Sri Lankan identity in relation to literary representations and understandings of nation, looking specifically at the work of the English language writing of Yasmine Gooneratne and Ambalavaner Sivanandan and the Sinhala writing of Gunadasa Amarasekara. While Sri Lankan history may not yield much evidence of an inclusive national identity one needs to raise the question as to why literature, which might be seen as a discourse where the improbable and idealistic is often explored, has failed to yield such a conception of idealistic nationhood. The tentative answer to this complex and multifaceted question proposed here is that it is related to the dominance of historical consciousness within the Sri Lankan cultural imagination and the choice of realism as a mode of representation.