Theorising Literary Islands
Theorising Literary Islands

Author: Ian Kinane

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-11-16

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1783488085

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Theorising Literary Islands is a literary and cultural study of both how and why the trope of the island functions within contemporary popular Robinsonade narratives. It traces the development of Western “islomania” – or our obsession with islands – from its origins in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe right up to contemporary Robinsonade texts, focusing predominantly on American and European representations of fictionalized Pacific Island topographies in contemporary literature, film, television, and other media. Theorising Literary Islands argues that the ubiquity of island landscapes within the popular imagination belies certain ideological and cultural anxieties, and posits that the emergence of a Western popular culture tradition can largely be traced through the development of the Robinsonade genre, and through early European and American fascination with the Pacific region.

Desert Islands and the Liquid Modern
Desert Islands and the Liquid Modern

Author: Barney Samson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-21

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 3030570460

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This book investigates desert islands in postwar anglophone popular culture, exploring representations in radio, print and screen advertising, magazine cartoons, cinema, video games, and comedy, drama and reality television. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity, desert island texts are analysed in terms of their intersections with repressive and seductive mechanisms of power. Chapters focus on the desert island as: a conflictingly in/coherent space that characterises identity as deferred and structured by choice; a location whose ‘remoteness’ undermines satirical critiques of communal identity formation; a site whose ambivalent relationship with ‘home’ and Otherness destabilises patriarchal ‘Western’ subjectivity; a space bound up with mobility and instantaneity; and an expression of radical individuality and underdetermined identity. The desert island in popular culture is shown to reflect, endorse and critique a profoundly consumerist society that seduces us with promises of coherence, with the threat of repression looming if we do not conform.

Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction
Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction

Author: Bernice M. Murphy

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2017-12-04

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1474414869

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This groundbreaking collection provides students with a timely and accessible overview of current trends within contemporary popular fiction.

Island Genres, Genre Islands
Island Genres, Genre Islands

Author: Ralph Crane

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-02-03

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1783482079

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'Island Genres, Genre Islands' moves the debate about literature and place onto new ground by exploring the island settings of bestsellers. Through a focus on four key genres—crime fiction, thrillers, popular romance fiction, and fantasy fiction—Crane and Fletcher show that genre is fundamental to both the textual representation of real and imagined islands and to actual knowledges and experiences of islands. The book offers broad, comparative readings of the significance of islandness in each of the four genres as well as detailed case studies of major authors and texts. These include chapters on Agatha’s Christie’s islands, the role of the island in ‘Bondspace,’ the romantic islophilia of Nora Roberts’s Three Sisters Island series, and the archipelagic geography of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. Crane and Fletcher’s book will appeal to specialists in literary studies and cultural geography, as well as in island studies.

Islands in Geography, Law, and Literature
Islands in Geography, Law, and Literature

Author: Chiara Battisti

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-04-04

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 3110770334

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This collection explores the heterogeneous places we have traditionally been taught to term ‘islands.’ It stages a conversation on the very idea of ‘island-ness’, thus contributing to a new field of research at the crossroads of law, geography, literature, urban planning, politics, arts, and cultural studies. The contributions to this volume discuss the notion of island-ness as a device triggering the imagination, triggering narratives and representations in different creative fields; they explore the interactions between legal, socio-political, and fictional approaches to remoteness and the ‘state of insularity,’ policy responses to both remoteness and boundaries on different scales, and the insular legal framing of geographical remoteness. The product of a cross-disciplinary exchange on islands, this edited volume will be of great interest to those working in the fields of Island Studies, as well as literary studies scholars, geographers, and legal scholars.

Imaging Identity
Imaging Identity

Author: Johannes Riquet

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-30

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 3030217744

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This volume explores the many facets and ongoing transformations of our visual identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its chapters engage with the constitution of personal, national and cultural identities at the intersection of the verbal and the visual across a range of media. They are attentive to how the medialities and (im)materialities of modern image culture inflect our conceptions of identity, examining the cultural and political force of literature, films, online video messages, rap songs, selfies, digital algorithms, social media, computer-generated images, photojournalism and branding, among others. They also reflect on the image theories that emerged in the same time span—from early theorists such as Charles S. Peirce to twentieth-century models like those proposed by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida as well as more recent theories by Jacques Rancière, W. J. T. Mitchell and others. The contributors of Imaging Identity come from a wide range of disciplines including literary studies, media studies, art history, tourism studies and semiotics. The book will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership interested in contemporary visual culture and image theory.

Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade
Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade

Author: Ian Kinane

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 178962004X

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Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade examines modern and contemporary Robinsonade texts written for young readers, looking specifically at the ways in which later adaptations of the Robinson Crusoe story subvert both traditional narrative structures and particular ideological codes within the genre. This collection redresses both the gender and geopolitical biases that have characterized most writings within the Robinsonade genre since its inception, and includes chapters on little-known works of fiction by female authors, as well as works from outside the mainstream of Anglo-American culture.

Topographies of Popular Culture
Topographies of Popular Culture

Author: Maarit Piipponen

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-08-17

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 144389916X

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Topographies of Popular Culture departs from the deceptively simple notion that popular culture always takes place somewhere. By studying the spatial and topographic imaginations at work in popular culture, the book identifies and illustrates several specific tendencies that deserve increased attention in studies of the popular. In combining the study of popular texts with a broad variety of geographical contexts, the volume presents a global and cross-cultural approach to popular culture’s topographies. In part, Topographies of Popular Culture takes its cue from recent theorisations of spatiality in the field of critical theory, and from such global transformations as the processes and after-effects of decolonisation and globalisation. It contemplates the spatiality of genre and the interactions between the local and the global, as well as the increasing circulation and adaptation of popular texts across the globe. The ten individual chapters analyse the spaces of popular culture at a scale that extends from an individual’s everyday experience to genuinely global questions, offering new theoretical and analytical insights into the relation between spatiality and the popular.

Rethinking Island Methodologies
Rethinking Island Methodologies

Author: Elaine Stratford

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-01-17

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1538165201

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Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, sociology, and literary studies and incorporating conversations with colleagues from around the world, the work considers significant, interdisciplinary questions shaping the field, including on belonging, boundedness, decolonization, governance, indigeneity, migration, sustainability, and the consequences of climate change. In the process, the authors model what it means to think about and rethink island and archipelagic methodologies and point to emergent innovations in the field.

Complicated Simplicity
Complicated Simplicity

Author: Joy Davis

Publisher: Heritage House Publishing Co

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1772032719

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A frank, practical, and entertaining exploration of the pleasures and complexities of living on small islands. Many people dream of living simple lives on small islands, but few are aware of some of the unique challenges that accompany this distinctive lifestyle. From negotiating surrounding waters to creating a sustainable home and making a viable life away from urban conveniences, small-island living can be rewarding or difficult (or both), depending on myriad circumstances. Complicated Simplicity: Island Life in the Pacific Northwest draws on a variety sources to contextualize peoples' enduring fascination with islands worldwide, including the author's own experiences growing up on Bath Island (off Gabriola) and her interviews with over twenty intrepid figures who live on the San Juan Islands, the Gulf Islands, the Discovery Islands, and in Clayoquot Sound. Ingenuity, tenacity, and a passion for living in these special places shine through in the personal stories, as does a shared concern for safety, sustainability, and thoughtful stewardship. Engaging, inspiring, and often funny, Complicated Simplicity offers readers honest and useful insights on the joys, perils, and rewards of island life.