Theorising Literary Islands

Ian Kinane is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, where he teaches popular genre fiction, postcolonial literatures, and children's literature. He is the editor of Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade: New Paradigms for Young Readers (Liverpool University Press 2018) and Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Ian is currently writing a monograph on British-Jamaica cultural relations in Ian Fleming's Jamaica-set James Bond novels, and he is the editor of the peer-review, open-access International Journal of James Bond Studies.

• Acknowledgments/ Introduction: “Which Came First, the Island Books, or Islomania?” / 1. Re-Reading Robinsonade Literature / 2. Geo-Imaginary Islands / 3. Islands: Topographies of Self / 4. Islands of Paradise? / 5. Remediating Islands: From Page to Screen / 6. Islands in Mediation / Afterword: Islands on the Horizon / Bibliography / Filmography / Index

In Theorising Literary Islands Ian Kinane deals with the notion that Robinson Crusoe persuaded readers that ‘islands were not confining but liberating; not lonely but contemplative’. Certainly the ‘Robinsonade’ genre to which Defoe’s Crusoe gave rise in literature and later other media has had major impacts on the perception of islands in guises from narratives of imperialism to contemporary tourism to any one of a huge number of insular destinations marketed ¬– or perhaps given an often challenging reality, rather hyped – as ‘paradise islands’. Focusing on the Pacific, Hau’ofa’s ‘sea of islands’, Kinane considers the ‘imaginative representation of island landscapes’ and its meaning at spatial and cultural scales ranging from the ‘topography of self’ – ‘I-land’ – to the seemingly endless mass appeal of the television series Survivor. Theorising Literary Islands will be of value to scholars of literature and also has wider appeal to those interested in the burgeoning field of Island Studies.