ABSTRACT:In recent years, there has generally been an increasing scholarly interest in island literature. German-language literature and scholarship concerning it have proven highly relevant to the analysis of contemporary island literature, yet these are rarely recognised within English-language island studies publications. The editorial introduction to this special thematic section on Island Fictions and Metaphors in Contemporary Literature sets the stage for further analyses. Theoretical discourses: island literature studiesRecent island discourses have been characterised by constant re-negotiations, ranging from traditional constructs of the insular as spaces of isolation and backwardness to concepts of islands as places of interconnectedness and fluidity. The increasing discussion about the construction of insular spaces is also matched by a noticeable turn to island fictions and metaphors in international literature in general and in German-language literature in particular, employing the island metaphor as an image for socio-political or ontological conditions, challenging and deconstructing common ideas about island spaces and thus inventing and even establishing, one might say, new island myths. Scholarship of insular spaces both as geographical as well as metaphorical places situates island studies within the so-called spatial turn in literary and cultural studies over the past decades with its focus on the analysis of fictional spaces at the interface of cultural and social sciences. As Patrick Ramponi et al. (2011, p. 7) state in the preface to their edited volume on islands and archipelagos (Wilkens et al. 2011), islands not only traditionally serve as places of longing, but are also useful epistemological tools for the analysis of historically variable figures of thought. As will also be shown in the contributions to this special thematic section, literary constructions of the insular can unfold on two levels: on the one hand on a semantic level, that is the island being developed as metaphor for a number of topics such as existential or political issues, as manifestations or subversions of power structures and gender hierarchies, but on the other hand also on a textual level by turning the insular into a structural feature hinting at specific re-conceptions of (linguistic) islands through aesthetic constructions or referring to the process of writing itself.A number of publications by German-language scholars have appeared in island literature studies over the past years, opening up a fruitful interdisciplinarity and offering a range of approaches. This means that the thematic section at hand deals with a highly topical subject and could even be considered as part of a specific Zeitgeist, emphasising the need for a discussion on the increase of insular spaces as a counterpoint to the 'dissolution' of space in current times of globalisation, in the context of which traditional concepts of space are intensely questioned. These

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In his 1998 'Peace Prize Speech', 1 Martin Walser complained that authors today are judged primarily for their public statements whilst their literary works are disregarded. 2 This may indeed be especially true for Walser himself, who has the dubious honour of having had two media debates in unified Germany named after him: the 'Walser-Bubis debate', or 'first Walser debate', which followed his polemic on the way National Socialism is remembered in the same speech, and the 'second Walser debate' concerning his novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic, 2002) regarding the question of anti-Semitism in this book. 3 His 1998 novel Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain) is closely linked to the first debate: the author's speech can be read as his response to the reception of his autobiographical novel about a childhood and youth during the Nazi period. 4 Literary works, therefore, do form a part of the discussions about the author, but in his opinion reviewers and commentators put contemporary social and political concerns 'before aesthetics' 5 and thus neglect the specific quality of literature. Walser's critique of memory in the Peace Prize Speech runs parallel to this distinction: the 'spirit of the time' demands political correctness and creates a hegemonic discourse about the past, which in Walser's view is opposed to personal and literary memory but also to what he terms German 'normality'. 6 In this way aesthetics and politics are uncomfortably intermingled in Walser's controversial speech. The author's insistence, however, that works of art should be viewed on their own terms is of course one with which literary scholars tend to agree. Questions of aesthetic autonomy are especially pertinent and sensitive when a fictional text depicts a politically contested past. The following analysis asks, then, what the specific qualities of Walser's literary form of memory are and whether his aesthetic approach is indeed free from memory politics. 7

all I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.« (Samuel Beckett) 1 Samuel Beckett beschäftigte sich von seiner Studienzeit (1923-27) an bis zu den letzten Jahren seines Lebens immer wieder intensiv mit Dantes Divina Commedia, 2 Seiner Biographin Deirdre Bair zufolge war die italienische Ausgabe der Divina Commedia, die Beckett schon in seiner Jugend besaß, einer von nur zwei Lieblingsgegenständen, die er in dem Pflegeheim, in dem er von 1988 bis zu seinem Tod 1989 lebte, bei sich hatte. 3 Auch für Becketts Werke ist die Divina Commedia von großer Bedeutung. Das hier als Motto verwendete Zitat zeigt, wie Dantes hochartistischer Text über das christliche Jenseits -in dem nur ein Teufel einmal »mit dem Hintern trompetet« 4 -bei Beckett mit der profanen 1 Mündliche Äußerung Becketts 1929, zitiert nach: Bair, S. 154. 2 Vgl. Bair, S. 41; 54; 95; 154; 526 und Knowlson S. 52; 453; 583; 618. Knowlson behauptet, Beckett habe die Divina Commedia als über 70jähriger »almost word for word« (ebd., S. 669) auswendig gekonnt. 3 »In 1988 he [...] had to be moved to a nursing home where he lived in a small room distinguished only by two favorite possessions: a television set, on which he watched cricket and tennis, and his boyhood copy of Dante's Divine Comedy in Italian« (Bair, S. xvi). 4 Vgl. Inferno XXI, 139.