Island studies : critical concepts in geography : volume II : charting from utopia to modern science : 1516 to the 1880s [Introduction]

Abstract

By the early sixteenth century, emboldened by the confidence and knowledge resulting from the Age of Discovery, Western thinkers were ready to take the ini¬tiative and deploy islands to fit their grand projects. Utopia ushered in many more island-inspired genres, including both exhortations and mockeries of ideal forms of governance. Other themes followed the islands. For a critique of colonialism, consider William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611); for an allegory on the vir¬tues of capitalism, look no further than Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719); and for a treatise on young boys coming of age and the essence of British views of Britishness, consider Robert M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island (1858). We also come across the microcosm of Lilliput and the mobile panopticon of the flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Not everything emerges from the Anglophone world, although again English translations are not always forthcoming, but from the French canon, comes the heart-breaking love story of Jacques-Henri de Saint Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1787).