Research Catalog

Title

The aesthetics of island space : perception, ideology, geopoetics / Johannes Riquet.

Author

Riquet, Johannes

Publication

• Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.
• ©2019

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvi, 353 pages : illustrations; 21 cm.

Summary

The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, in the journals of explorers and scientists such as James Cook and Charles Darwin, and in Hollywood cinema. It traces the ways in which literary and cinematic islands have functioned as malleable spatial figures that offer vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the material energies of words and images and the energies of the physical world. 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 mutable islands. It argues that modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual and cognitive challenges to the experience of space, and that these challenges were negotiated in complex and contradictory ways via poetic engagement with islands. Discussions of island narratives in postcolonial theory have broadened understanding of how islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions, bounded spaces easily subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story. In this alternative account, the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space.0Drawing on and rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space argues that the modern experience of islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a dispersal, fragmentation, and diversification of spatial experience, and it explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by both non-fictional and fictional responses.

Series Statement

Oxford Textual Perspectives

Uniform Title

Oxford textual perspectives.

Subject

• Islands in literature
• Islands in motion pictures
• Space in literature
• Space in motion pictures
• 17.80 literary theory: general

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-341) and index.

Contents

Introduction: towards a poetics of (the) island(s) -- From island to island, and beyond : arrivals in the new land -- Islands on the horizon : the camera at the borders of the tropical island -- From insularity to islandness : fractals, fuzzy borders, and the fourth dimension -- From islands to archipelagos : volcanism, coral and geopoetics -- Epilogue: The life on/of islands.

Call Number

JFD 20-3209

ISBN

• 9780198832409
• 0198832400
• 9780198832416
• 0198832419

OCLC

1121196023

Author

Riquet, Johannes, author.

Title

The aesthetics of island space : perception, ideology, geopoetics / Johannes Riquet.

Publisher

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Copyright Date

©2019

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Oxford Textual Perspectives

Oxford textual perspectives.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-341) and index.

Research Call Number

JFD 20-3209