Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination

Elizabeth Mcmahon

Description

Discusses original material that enables new connections to be made and reshape the Australian literary canon and presents the first in-depth, interdisciplinary consideration of the Australian and Caribbean relationship in Australian literary studies.

Elizabeth McMahon's book has been awarded the Walter McRae Russell prize. It was announced as the best book of Australian literary scholarship published in the last two years by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) at their annual conference.

Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginaries of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands, both their real and material conditions and their symbolic power, from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern 'man' who is imagined as being the island's mirror. The inter-relationship of the island fantasy, colonial expansion, and the literary construction of place and history, created a new 'man': the dislocated and alienated subject of post-colonial modernity.

This book looks at the contradictory images of islands, from the allure of the desert island as a paradise where the world can be made anew to their roles as prisons, as these ideas are made concrete at moments of British colonialism. It also considers alternatives to viewing islands as objects of possession in the archipelagic visions of island theorists and writers.

It compares the European understandings of the first and last of the new worlds, the Caribbean archipelago and the Australian island continent, to calibrate the different ways these disparate geographies unifed and fractured the concept of the planetary globe. In particular it examines the role of the island in this process, specifically its capacity to figure a 'graspable globe' in the mind.

The book draws on the colonial archive and ranges across Australian literature from the first novel written and published in Australia (by a convict on the island of Tasmania) to both the ancient dreaming and the burgeoning literature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the twenty-first century. It discusses Australian literature in an international context, drawing on the long traditions of literary islands across a range of cultures. The book's approach is theoretical and engages with contemporary philosophy, which uses the island and the archipleago as a key metaphor. It is also historicist and includes considerable original historical research. 

Section 1. Islands Real and Imaginary; Introduction; Chapter One. What’s in a Metaphor: ‘No Man is an Island’; Section 2. Islands: Making the Planet, World, Globe; Chapter Two: The First and Last Of New Worlds: The Caribbean and Australia; Chapter Three: Insular and Continental Interiors: The Shifting Map of Literary Universalism after the War; Section 3. Dreams and Nightmares; Chapter Four: Accidents of Empire: Shipwrecks and Castaways; Chapter Five: The Best and Worst of Times: Utopias, Dystopias, Archipelagos.

Sujets

• Landscape
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 09 juillet 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783085361
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination
Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture
Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture specializes in quality, innovative research in Australian literary studies. The series publishes work that advances contemporary scholarship on Australian literature conceived historically, thematically and/or conceptually. We welcome well-researched and incisive analyses on a broad range of topics: from individual authors or texts to considerations of the field as a whole, including in comparative or transnational frames.
Series Editors
Katherine Bode - Australian National University, Australia
Nicole Moore - University of New South Wales, Australia
Editorial Board
Tanya Dalziell - University of Western Australia, Australia
Delia Falconer - University of Technology, Sydney, Australia​
John Frow - University of Sydney, Australia
Wang Guanglin - Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China
Ian Henderson - King s College London, United Kingdom
Tony Hughes-D Aeth - University of Western Australia, Australia
Ivor Indyk - University of Western Sydney, Australia
Nicholas Jose - University of Adelaide, Australia
James Ley - Sydney Review of Books , Australia
Susan Martin - La Trobe University, Australia
Andrew McCann - Dartmouth College, United States
Elizabeth McMahon - University of New South Wales, Australia
Susan Martin - La Trobe University, Australia
Brigitta Olubus - University of New South Wales, Australia
Anne Pender - University of New England, Australia
Fiona Polack - Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Sue Sheridan - University of Adelaide, Australia
Ann Vickery - Deakin University, Australia
Russell West-Pavlov - Eberhard-Karls-Universit t T bingen, Germany
Lydia Wevers - Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Gillian Whitlock - University of Queensland, Australia​
Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination
Elizabeth McMahon
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2016
by ANTHEM PRESS
75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Elizabeth McMahon 2016
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McMahon, Elizabeth, author.
Title: Islands, identity and the literary imagination / Elizabeth McMahon.
Description: New York : Anthem Press, 2016. | Series: Anthem studies in
Australian literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016016118 | ISBN 9781783085347 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Australian literature - History and criticism. | Islands in
literature. | Geography in literature. | Place (Philosophy) in literature.
| National characteristics, Australian, in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY
CRITICISM / Australian & Oceanian. | ARCHITECTURE / Landscape.
Classification: LCC PR9604.3 .M35 2016 | DDC 820.9/994-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016118
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 534 7 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1 78308 534 7 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Section 1.
Islands Real and Imaginary

Introduction
Chapter 1.
What s in a Metaphor: No Man Is an Island
Section 2.
Islands: Making the Planet, World, Globe
Chapter 2.
The First and Last of New Worlds: The Caribbean and Australia
Chapter 3.
Insular and Continental Interiors: The Shifting Map of Literary Universalism after the War
Section 3.
Dreams and Nightmares
Chapter 4.
Accidents of Empire: Shipwrecks and Castaways
Chapter 5.
The Best and Worst of Times: Utopias, Dystopias, Archipelagos
Appendix. Colonial Ties between the West Indies and Australia
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 Fool s Cap Map of the World (1580-1590). Courtesy British Library 2.1 Andrew Bent s Stanhope press, on which Australia s first novel, Quintus Servinton by Henry Savery, was printed, on display in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Courtesy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery 3.1 Sidney Nolan, Burke and Wills Expedition (1948). Courtesy Canberra Museum and Gallery, Nolan Collection 4.1 Engraving of the massacre that followed the Batavia shipwreck - from the Jan Janz 1647 edition of Ongeluckige Voyagie . Courtesy Western Australia Museum 4.2 Inside front cover of the 1938 edition of Madman s Island by Ion Idriess showing his writing of the text on a ship s log book he found while in hiding on Howick Island. Courtesy the publishers ETT Imprint, Sydney 4.3 Joan Collins in Our Girl Friday (Twentieth Century Fox, 1953), an adaptation of The Cautious Amorist by Norman Lindsay. Courtesy Photofestnyc 5.1 Cover of the first edition of Thomas More s Utopia (1516). Courtesy Ashmolean Museum 5.2 Miniature World in the hothouse of the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Garden, Hobart, during World War II. Courtesy Archives Office of Tasmania 5.3 Paul Dwyer and Kylie Doomadgee in the 2012 production of Beautiful One Day. Photograph Heidrun L hr. Courtesy Belvoir St Theatre and the actors
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Research undertaken for this book was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant, which was greatly enabling and for which I am very grateful. I also received research and conference grants from the School of the Arts and Media (2013, 2014, 2015) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). I am very fortunate to work in an institution that supports research so well. I am also fortunate to have such great colleagues in the English program at UNSW, in particular Brigitta Olubas, with whom I have collaborated on numerous teaching and research projects. In addition to the inspiring dialogue of ideas, Brigitta invited me to speak on Shirley Hazzard s literary islands at the Hazzard conference she organized at Columbia University in 2012. I have benefitted greatly from multiple collaborations with Elaine Stratford at the University of Tasmania and Godfrey Baldacchino at the University of Malta, who have encouraged me to make connections between literary islands and their material and cultural conditions and expanded the aspiration and, hopefully, the reach of my work.
I have given many conference papers on literary islands and published numerous essays. I thank Vanessa Smith from the University of Sydney who was supportive in publishing my early work in this field. I have attended every annual conference of the Australian Association for the Study of Australian Literature since 2003, each year delivering a paper on Australia s literary islands. I thank the 2012 conference organizer, Lydia Wevers, who invited me to give the Dorothy Green Memorial lecture, on trans-Tasman literary geographies, at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. I thank the interlocutors at these and other conferences and scholarly referees for their feedback, which increased my knowledge and sharpened my thought. Parts of some of these chapters have been published in earlier versions in several journals: a small part of the Introduction appeared in Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature ( JASAL 2013), another short section of Chapter 2 appeared in JASAL (2012), a small section of Chapter 3 was published in The Novels of Alex Miller (2012) and small sections of Chapter 5 were published in Southerly (2001) and Island Studies Journal (2013).
I thank my research assistant Laura Joseph, Jacinta Kelly for proofing a full draft and overseeing permissions and Kate Livett for reading and analysing drafts and preparing the extensive table of Australian-West Indian connections in the Appendix. I thank Hannah Fink for suggesting the wonderful Segar Passi image for the cover. I thank the Anthem Press team for their exemplary professionalism. I was advised of Anthem s high standards before this book was contracted and this assessment has been confirmed by my own experience. Any errors are mine.
My family have always been great supporters of my work over a lifetime: keenly interested, enabling and patient. This book was written over a period when my parents and my brother Michael died. They would have been so happy to see this work out in the world. This book is dedicated to them, and to Kate, for everything.
Section 1
ISLANDS REAL AND IMAGINARY
INTRODUCTION
Generations of Australian schoolchildren learned to describe their homeland as the world s largest island and the world s smallest continent . 1 It is such a pleasing construction. It comprehends the two major topographies of land, islands and continents, in a reversed relation of scale, for islands are meant to be small and continents large. This inversion of the norm fits well with the concept of Australia s upside-down status when viewed from the boreal perspective of Europe. Despite the implicit judgemen