'Australia is the planet's sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginary of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands: their real and material conditions and their symbolic resonance from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern'man'who is imagined as being the island's natural inhabitant or mirror. Importantly, the book challenges these habits of thought by their relocation within larger topological and imaginary visions from islanders themsleves.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination examines insularity primarily in Australian literature but also in literary theory, in Caribbean literature, and to a lesser extent in British, Indian, and American writing. By literature here is meant a broad range of genres: poetry, plays, novels, and short stories as well as nonfiction pamphlets, histories, and more. Some of the literature and history is formal and canonical, and some is popular and ephemeral. Elizabeth McMahon displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the many references to islands, shipwrecks, and utopias in the works she studies and in the secondary literature on them. The thesis is that Australia is insular yet also continental, a ‘contradiction and inversion’ and so ‘a space that contain an otherness within itself… endlessly baffling and, hence, philosophical and creative’ (3). As an ‘island continent,’ it has been seen as permeable yet bounded, isolated from the world yet connected to it, non-modern yet futuristic, one entity yet an array of islands, ‘a perfect object of control’ but escaping encapsulation, manmade and natural, and a place of ‘escape and luxury’ while also a prison and a trap (4–5). Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination scrutinizes these conjunctions in the many varied texts it addresses.' (Publication abstract)
'Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination examines insularity primarily in Australian literature but also in literary theory, in Caribbean literature, and to a lesser extent in British, Indian, and American writing. By literature here is meant a broad range of genres: poetry, plays, novels, and short stories as well as nonfiction pamphlets, histories, and more. Some of the literature and history is formal and canonical, and some is popular and ephemeral. Elizabeth McMahon displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the many references to islands, shipwrecks, and utopias in the works she studies and in the secondary literature on them. The thesis is that Australia is insular yet also continental, a ‘contradiction and inversion’ and so ‘a space that contain an otherness within itself… endlessly baffling and, hence, philosophical and creative’ (3). As an ‘island continent,’ it has been seen as permeable yet bounded, isolated from the world yet connected to it, non-modern yet futuristic, one entity yet an array of islands, ‘a perfect object of control’ but escaping encapsulation, manmade and natural, and a place of ‘escape and luxury’ while also a prison and a trap (4–5). Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination scrutinizes these conjunctions in the many varied texts it addresses.' (Publication abstract)
