Cirrus@Austlit

'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)