Island metapoetics and beyond: introducing island poetics, Part II

This is the second part of a two-part paper co-authored by the members of the Island Poetics Research Group, which introduces a larger project on the poetic construction of islands in island fictions across media, genres, and geographical regions. Traditional island scholarship tends to discuss islands as tropes for a set of often preconceived and fixed meanings (such as isolation, imprisonment, paradise, remoteness, etc.) and thus often bypasses the complex poetic processes through which islands come to be in literary texts. Our intervention in the debate seeks to offer a precise analysis of the practices and operations through which islands are conceived and reconceived. The two parts of this paper examine different modes of island (re)conception in 20th- and 21st-century island fiction. They discuss fictional islands as particularly mobile spatial figures that raise the question of what an island is, refusing to offer easy answers and allowing for a reconsideration of the role of islands in contemporary discourse. Against potentially essentialist accounts of what islands ‘are’ and ‘mean’, our close readings of key moments within island narratives engage with the processes through which island spaces are constructed in different media. Part II engages more deeply with the textures of the media themselves in order to analyze the ways in which island metapoetics implicitly or explicitly exposes the processes of island construction. The article ends with a discussion of how island narratives can draw attention to and resist their own conceptions of islandness and thus interrogate the very object of island studies.