The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics

This book focuses on the challenges and uncertainties involved when island geography is translated into words and images, and it explores the complexities and contradictions of islands as figures of thought in Western modernity. Other studies have shown how islands have been imagined as bounded, easily controllable spaces and colonial territories; The Aesthetics of Island Space argues that they have been linked to disorientation and confusion as much as to spatial mastery and control. The book traces four lines in the vast sea of Anglo-American island stories, each of which has its beginning in one of modernity’s voyages of discovery. The chapters focus on America’s island gateways (Roanoke and Ellis Island), visions of tropical islands (Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the US-Canadian border region in the Pacific Northwest, and the imaginative appeal of geologically mutable islands. The book studies the journals of explorers and scientists alongside literary texts and films. It discusses a panorama of real and imagined journeys that take their narrators, protagonists, and readers to the limits of human perception and understanding, where borders are drawn and dissolved in a disorienting world between water and land.