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Spandri, Elena, editor

Twixt land and sea : island poetics in an anglophone literatures

2019 - Artemide

244 p. : col. ill.

  • Includes bibliographical references and index.
  • Islands have always occupied a prominent place in English and Anglophone literatures. Separated from other lands by water, they lend themselves to fantasy and mythology, are repositories of folklore, and can be both safe havens and sites of great upheaval. An ambivalent and paradoxical discourse about insularity has accompanied the formation of the British empire since its inception, gaining currency in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Today, while the empire "writes back" and Archipelagic Studies remap the globe across rich trajectories of cultural exchanges, the emergence of a 'Brexit sensibility' seems to reinvest the insularity discourse with fresh value.
  • 'Twixt Land and Sea collects essays that address the wide galaxy of island writing – ranging from Shakespeare to Melville, from Haiti to India – and share the idea that critical discourse needs to engage with the deeply metaphoric potential of islands and archipelagos, as much as it needs to acknowledge their materiality and geo-cultural significance [Publisher's text].
  • Collected essays.