Island Studies Journal, 2016

To date, studies of the contribution literature makes to ideas about islands have concentrated on "high" literature. This has left unexamined the largest proportion of literature featuring islands. If one of the goals of island studies is to interrogate prevailing ideas about "islandness," then the islands that crowd the storyworlds of popular genres merit close attention. This article focuses on popular fiction to advocate "performative geographies" as a key concept for island studies of literature, and indeed other domains of culture. Popular genres are undeniably sources of distraction and entertainment for billions of readers. However, they are also systems of meaning, which have an immeasurable impact on our geographical awareness and imagination. This article uses critical snapshots of Anglophone island-set crime fiction and popular romance fiction to show the meta-geographical potential of popular novels as they both depict and reflect on islands...

In recent years, there has generally been an increasing scholarly interest in island literature. German-language literature and scholarship concerning it have proven highly relevant to the analysis of contemporary island literature, yet these are rarely recognised within English-language island studies publications. The editorial introduction to this special thematic section on Island Fictions and Metaphors in Contemporary Literature sets the stage for further analyses.

This two-part paper, co-authored by the members of the Island Poetics Research Group, introduces a larger project on the poetic construction of islands in popular island fictions across media, genres, and geographical regions. Traditional island scholarship tends to discuss islands as tropes for a set of preconceived and fixed meanings (such as isolation, imprisonment, paradise, remoteness, etc.) and thus often bypasses the complex poetic processes through which islands come to be in literary texts. Our intervention in the debate seeks to offer a precise analysis of the practices and operations through which islands are conceived and reconceived. The two parts of this paper examine different modes of island (re)conception in 20th- and 21st-century island fiction. They discuss fictional islands as particularly mobile spatial figures that raise the question of what an island is, refusing to offer easy answers and allowing for a reconsideration of the role of islands in contemporary discourse. Against potentially essentialist accounts of what islands ‘are’ and ‘mean’, our close readings of key moments within island narratives engage with the processes through which island spaces are constructed in different media. In this first part, we develop a phenomenology of fictional islands that focuses on the ways in which island topographies are constructed through the senses and through spatial practices. In our analysis, islands emerge through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch (and frequently a confluence of these sensory experiences) or they are (re)conceived through the movements across and/or interaction with their topography.

diacritics, special issue Robert A. Davidson and Joan Ramon Resina, eds., New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, National Trajectories, 2003

Realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket.-William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra Bearings Drifting among the topoi the Middle Ages inherited from classical culture, islands held on to many of their characteristics throughout this long period and simultaneously nurtured new paradigms, which led to multiple and profound transformations of the motif in early modern imaginaries. In the medieval period the island serves simply as a setting , as a site for the articulation of fiction and reality, to which many texts from different traditions can attest, from philosophical debates to romances to clerical works, from northern Europe to the south of the Iberian peninsula. It is in the literature of late medieval Iberia, precisely, that a major shift in the use of insular geographies can be documented, one that bore profound consequences for the development of genres and, especially, for the consideration of fiction itself. When we reach the Renaissance, there occurs a discursive separation between fiction and reality. The shift to a clearer separation is conveyed in both Renaissance cartography and narrative in the form of the island as an ideal metaphor for such distancing. This shift has a major structural implication for the construction of new genres. By separating fiction from reality, the literary solutions that come forth give rise to the modern novel, of which Don Quijote (1605, 1615) is considered to be the first. In cartography, the result is the emergence of the atlas. 1 The use of the island is pervasive in the book of chivalry and is directly borrowed from this genre in Don Quijote. Through a process of metaphorization, the use of the island as a structure in Don Quijote is one of the traits marking the difference between the book of chivalry and the novel. 2 The distance established by the relocation of marvelous contents to an island and the metaphoric use of the motif in the modern novel reveal the configuration of a new concept of fiction. In fact, Spanish Golden Age literary theories elaborated the separation of fiction and reality in great detail, and the book of chivalry, with its insistent use of the insular, became exemplary of what was then to be perceived, now in clearly neg-1. See Lestringant. While he does not discuss libros de caballerías or the novel along with the atlas, his documentation and numerous insights on spatial articulations in (particularly French) literature and in the movement from isolario to atlas are relevant here. 2. I fully document and develop these ideas in my doctoral dissertation [see Pinet]. For an extensive documentation, especially in cartography and in French literature, see Lestringantʼs reflections on the enterprise of discovery and colonization of the Americas, as well as his writings on Rabelais, of special interest to my analysis here. diacritics 33.

This is the second part of a two-part paper co-authored by the members of the Island Poetics Research Group, which introduces a larger project on the poetic construction of islands in island fictions across media, genres, and geographical regions. Traditional island scholarship tends to discuss islands as tropes for a set of often preconceived and fixed meanings (such as isolation, imprisonment, paradise, remoteness, etc.) and thus often bypasses the complex poetic processes through which islands come to be in literary texts. Our intervention in the debate seeks to offer a precise analysis of the practices and operations through which islands are conceived and reconceived. The two parts of this paper examine different modes of island (re)conception in 20th- and 21st- century island fiction. They discuss fictional islands as particularly mobile spatial figures that raise the question of what an island is, refusing to offer easy answers and allowing for a reconsideration of the role of islands in contemporary discourse. Against potentially essentialist accounts of what islands ‘are’ and ‘mean’, our close readings of key moments within island narratives engage with the processes through which island spaces are constructed in different media. Part II engages more deeply with the textures of the media themselves in order to analyze the ways in which island metapoetics implicitly or explicitly exposes the processes of island construction. The article ends with a discussion of how island narratives can draw attention to and resist their own conceptions of islandness and thus interrogate the very object of island studies.

Island Studies Journal 10.1, 2015

Some preliminary thoughts were penned in 1991, on the founding of an academic journal devoted to the study of the world’s islands. This collated contribution is an opportunity to look back critically at what was advised then, and what has actually come to pass through Island Studies Journal. Russell King’s prescient report from 1991 is followed by a series of candid reflections by members of ISJ’s International Editorial Board.

Literary Imagation, 2020

Consider the Island,' Deryck Scarr invites us in his history of the Pacific: 'the idea of the island.' 1 That idea, which Westerners brought to and imposed upon the insular Pacific, is of serious antiquity, in existence well before Magellan's entry to it in 1521. 'Those of us involved in Pacific studies,' Kerry Howe writes, 2 'have been too impressed with the apparent novelty of the eighteenth-century Pacific dream island. But that Tahitian mirage was at the end of a very long imaginative tradition, one that long predated the Enlightenment, and even the Renaissance. Indeed it goes back to the very beginnings of Western civilization'-in Greek myth, Plato's Atlantis, the Bible, and stories like the supremely imaginative 'The Shipwrecked Sailor' from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Rousseauesque dream and mirage faded rapidly enough in Western thought after first contact with Tahiti in the 1760s, as stories of Polynesian infanticide and homosexuality were eagerly circulated by the fourth estate in an atmosphere of religious revival in late eighteenth-century England. (John Hawkesworth's editorial compendium of 1773, An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of his present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, was an important early revelation in that process.) But a myth inverted need lose little of its power and influence. That which was once utopian became dystopian, and the noble savage became ignoble, but the precedent myth of island isolation, augmented as it had been by accounts of Magellan's travels by Antonio Pigafetta and others, accompanied and intensified almost every aspect of the West's imaginative involvement with the 'South Sea'. It does so still, though indigenous writers and historians have long since cast doubt upon it. The most important revisionary intervention in that

Pólemos, 2020

Within the cross-disciplinary research on “Law, Changes and Technology,” this essay introduces the focus on “Islands and insularity: between law, geography, and fiction.” The intriguing and enthralling topic of “Island-ness” places emphasis on the manifold intersections between law, geographic studies, political power, and the humanities. These intersections reflect several issues, such as territorial localisation, environmental crises, colonial imaginaries, as well as the insular societal contexts in which they are imbricated. The focus delivers both a synthetic view of these questions and opens up further perspectives for reflection. The contributions engage various topics and adopt different approaches. Beyond this richness of inputs, the essays reveal some common characteristics of islands and insularity as objects and subjects of human imagination, social organisation, and scientific reflection. In particular, two main issues of islands and insularity can be identified, i.e. di...

Island Studies Journal, 2013

This paper argues for a shift in the focus of island-themed scholarship away from theories of islandness toward an engagement with psychologies of island experience. The former project has become mired in intractable dilemmas. The present paper pursues two linked lines of observation. First, it is maintained that integral to any coherent notion of islandness is a psychology that simultaneously assimilates containment with remoteness and isolation (the latter not to be equated with disconnectedness). In some of its manifestations this psychology is pathological in character, conducive to despair, cultural and economic stagnation, and a xenophobic conservatism. In others it is enabling, conducive to resilience, resourcefulness, cultural dynamism and a can-do economics. It may also make islands unusually relevant, rather than unimportant backwaters, in the search for workable modes of living on a small and fraught planet. Second, it is contended that, if there is enough in the notion o...