From Insularity to Islandness

Chapter 3 draws on (post-)phenomenology, ecocriticism, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry to examine a set of diaries and memoirs from the US–Canadian border region in the Pacific Northwest that express a permeable conception of islands and the islanded self. It argues that memoirs like Helene Glidden’s The Light on the Island (1951), Muriel Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time (1961), and David Conover’s Once Upon an Island (1967) imagine islands as spaces inserted within larger ecological and geological continuities. Their reimagination of islands in multiple interconnectedness disrupts arbitrarily drawn political borders, yet they also have a tendency to construct a unified ecological landscape with its own exclusions. Conversely, George Vancouver’s North Pacific journal—the foundational text for this chapter—and the geological diary of George Gibbs inadvertently offer a more radical island poetics: in these texts, the unfamiliar islandscapes aesthetically resist the cartographic drive to fix them.

Epilogue

In the frame narrative of Michael Powell’s 1937 film The Edge of the World, we see a tourist yacht approaching the island of Hirta in the Outer Hebrides.1 At least, this is the diegetic island of the film: the boat is actually approaching the island of Foula in the Shetlands. Powell did not receive permission to film on Hirta, also known as St Kilda, whose tiny population had asked to be removed to the Scottish mainland in 1930. ...

Islands on the Horizon

Chapter 2 explores the mediation of perception across the border of the tropical island. It initially discusses how the accounts of European explorers in the Pacific turned islands into discrete, highly aestheticized images. It then traces the multimedial paths along which these island-images travelled from the Pacific journals into the American cultural imaginary, manifested by Hollywood’s island films in the 1920s and 1930s, which transform the (proto-cinematic) visual strategies of the journals. While the chapter discusses the ideological needs Western island-images have been made to serve, it is especially interested in how these texts and films resist the freezing of the island into a bounded image and ask readers and viewers to reflect on their own aesthetic experience of islands. Accordingly, it complicates the cinematic gaze from the water to the island in three films: White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), The Hurricane (1937), and, finally, King Kong (1933).

From Island to Island, and Beyond

Chapter 1 examines the centrality of islands as gateways to the New World. The texts examined in it poeticize spatial experiences that oscillate between a sense of emergence and possibility and a corresponding fear of submergence and dissolution. The chapter begins by discussing accounts by immigrants passing through Angel Island and Ellis Island in the context of a long tradition of real and imaginary voyages to America. It then turns to two transoceanic island narratives. The first is Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), which is read alongside accounts of England’s early colonial experiments on Roanoke Island. It is argued that Shakespeare’s play and the Roanoke documents negotiate an island arrival that is both hopeful and fraught with uncertainty. The second is Cecil B. DeMille’s film Male and Female (1919), which imagines a sort of fictional Ellis Island, thereby responding to a long line of island arrivals in the New World.

Introduction

Drawing on (post-)phenomenological and geopoetic perspectives, the introduction explains the book’s interest in considering islands at the intersection of material and poetic production on the one hand, and aesthetic experience of the phenomenal world on the other. It suggests that the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space, and that fictional and non-fictional representations of islands negotiate these perceptual challenges. It thereby explains how The Aesthetic of Island Space complicates the common account of islands as discrete shapes, geometrical abstractions, and easily understandable images. Instead, it foregrounds the importance of water, mobility, and a range of dynamic geo(morpho)logical and poetic processes in the figuration of islands. The introduction ends by discussing the significance of considering islands in relation to an ‘aesthetics of the earth’ (DeLoughrey and Handley) and a poetics of the material world.

From Islands to Archipelagos

The texts examined in Chapter 4 explore islands in geo(morpho)logical space-time. The chapter begins by discussing how the relational poetics of Darwin’s and Wallace’s writings ask readers to reimagine planetary space as a discontinuous multiplicity of shifting islands. The notion of a geopoetic resonance between the material energies of the physical world and the poetic energies of language guides the analyses of three literary responses to Darwin, Wallace, and their successors. H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and ‘Aepyornis Island’ (1894) figure islands as beleaguered territories haunted by the spectre of human extinction. However, their geopoetic descriptions of volcanism and coral suspend these evolutionary narratives. A century later, Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide explores the radical poetic implications of Darwin and Wallace’s archipelagic thinking. In the novel, the human element intersects with other living forms, physical geography, and textual spaces to form a mutable landscape shaped by conflicts.