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.

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.

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 as performative geographies, or spaces that make and unmake individual and social identities.

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...

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...

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.

2013

As part of an ancient mythology that saw an animated nature reflected in every place and thing, the island motif has long resonated with spiritual and political significance within Irish culture, and none more so than the Blasket Islands, which rose to prominence as Ireland undertook the processes of national Revival. Reverberating with the ancient significances of the island motif as a place of heightened metaphysical experience, the Great Blasket Island, home of Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Peig Sayers and Muiris Ó Suilleabháin, stirred the imaginations of those who lived upon it and of those who visited. Although the island community ceased to be more than half a century ago, the Blasket Islands continue to fascinate. This article will offer a brief telling of the Blasket story and then examine the various significances of the island motif in Irish culture that drew the Blasket Islands into the nation's story of cultural and political revival. It will then consider various representations of the Blaskets in literature written since the demise of the island community-poetry, including Brendan Behan'

Tekstualia

The paper explores the functioning of the island motif in early modern literature and its later evolution into an instrument of critiquing the traditional European culture. In both cases islands are considered as a special kind of laboratories conceptualized both as places of work and places where experiments are performed in the ideal conditions of isolation from the external world.

This paper examines the history and development of books about islands in Western culture. Islands are prominent in Homer’s Odyssey, and Plato’s island of Atlantis is perhaps the most famous mythical island of all time. The Greeks were the first to develop the island-book as such, but Roman writers showed much less interest in insular themes. The article traces the history of the immrama (medieval Irish accounts of mythical Atlantic island voyages), notes the importance of islands in Marco Polo and John of Mandeville, describes the rise of the isolario, or island-book illustrated with maps, and concludes with the emergence of the Robinsonade.