Dreaming of islands: individuality and utopian desire in post-Darwinian literature

Sreenan, Niall

doi:10.24043/isj.34

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Scholars from different disciplines have investigated how writers utilize islands to "project political and social possibilities" (Savory, 2011, p. 37) or as "performative geographies" (Crane & Fletcher, 2016, p. 637). Niall Sreenan (2017) identifies a genealogy of post-Darwinian narratives in which the island facilitates a specifically utopian dream of individual autonomy, which is bound up with the ideology of capitalism. For other writers, island locales are "prime sites for piracy, smuggling, slavery, and all manner of inhumane incarceration" (Lowenthal, 2007, p. 215).…”

Section: Island Food and The Juxtaposition Of Utopia And Dystopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Envisioning a ‘good’ utopia on a dystopian island: culinary and cultural conflicts in Lord of the Flies

Xiao¹,

Chen²

2022

ISJ

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Thanks to the rising interest in island literary studies, there is a considerable body of research on the relationship between islands and utopia/dystopia, but the motif of food, namely, what characters eat on an island, has seldom been explored. Using Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson’s theories on utopia and dystopia as an interpretive lens, and drawing upon the varied contentions regarding food and eating by Levi-Strauss, Paul Atkinson, Carol J. Adams and other theorists, this paper examines the triangular relationship of island, food, and utopia/dystopia in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The paper argues that although this island story is generally categorized as dystopian, it blends both utopian and dystopian discourses and represents a literary endeavour to envision a ‘good’ utopia. This argument is supported by a detailed analysis of how the eating practices of the British schoolboys marooned on a desert island parallel their attempts to construct a desirable microcosm. By vividly depicting the boys’ contrasting culinary patterns of gathering fruit and hunting pigs, Golding subverts the hierarchy built upon the opposition between the raw/vegetable and the cooked/meat and their corresponding implications of ‘the barbarous’ and ‘the civilized.’ His further depictions of the boys’ cannibalism and degeneration into savages showcase his vision of human beings’ universal evil, his doubt about the linear progress of Western society, and his caution about the potential disasters that might befall seemingly progressive civilization due to the fall of mankind.

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Section: Island Food and The Juxtaposition Of Utopia And Dystopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Envisioning a ‘good’ utopia on a dystopian island: culinary and cultural conflicts in Lord of the Flies

Xiao¹,

Chen²

2022

ISJ

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“…Within island studies, Sreenan (2017) provided an incisive critique of the trope of utopia in the context of post-Darwinian island literature. Through close reading of four British novels set on islands, the author arrived at the inherent paradox of island utopia as both a space of transcendent autonomy and a place of contingent evolution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utopian and insular spaces in Chinese literature: An island approach

Hu¹

2022

ISJ

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In response to the relative lack of scholarly attention paid to the relationship between island utopia and Chinese literature, this paper studies the imagination of both island and insular geographies in Chinese ‘utopian’ literature using an island-sensitive approach. Employing an expanded and constructive conception of the island, the paper examines the heterogeneity of Chinese island and insular imaginaries in literary works from diverse historical periods, especially in relation to the dominant western model of the remote tropical oceanic island. Based on the finding that the alterity of Chinese island and insular imagination lies as much in its depiction of spatial ambiguities as in its mixing of diverse figures, I reflect further on the benefits and perils of adopting a west-inflected island approach in examining the imaginary landscapes of utopianism and insularity in Chinese literature. It is argued that Chinese island literature is more a reading effect enabled by an imported theoretical approach than any inherent tradition in itself. In the end, two paths for innovating island aesthetics and epistemologies in cross-cultural contexts are proposed.

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“…In 'Dreaming of Islands: Individuality and Utopian Desire in Post-Darwinian Literature', Niall Sreenan (2017) links the island topos to central notions of Western thought: individual autonomy and the idea of a human biological independence, which -despite the broad acceptance of Darwin's insights into evolutionary interrelations -maintains a clear demarcation between the human and the non-human animal. Sreenan analyses the use of the island in literature as a space in which such autonomy can be imagined; at the same time, he shows how the idea of an absolute isolation of the island turns out to be as untenable as the concept of human independence and sovereignty.…”

Section: Island Conceptions: Island Making Processes and Relationalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Island fictions and metaphors in contemporary literature

Dautel¹,

Schödel²

2017

ISJ

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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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Dreaming of islands: individuality and utopian desire in post-Darwinian literature

Cited by 4 publications

References 4 publications

Envisioning a ‘good’ utopia on a dystopian island: culinary and cultural conflicts in Lord of the Flies

Envisioning a ‘good’ utopia on a dystopian island: culinary and cultural conflicts in Lord of the Flies

Utopian and insular spaces in Chinese literature: An island approach

Island fictions and metaphors in contemporary literature

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