Island Studies and the Poetics of the Shore

This talk explores the relationship between island studies and the shore. One reason why island studies has been slow to conceptualise littoral space may paradoxically be found in the orientation towards the sea that was foundational to the emergence of the field. Yet the shore has been a persistent presence in research about literary islands, even if this scholarship is sometimes located beyond the disciplinary mainstream of island studies. Taking seriously Greg Dening’s assertion that ‘[a]ll islands have beaches’ (2004, 13), I will chart the literal and conceptual shores that have shaped the representation of islands as well as scholarship about islands as literary and cultural spaces – from colonial and postcolonial island beaches to Indigenous shores and the planetary archipelago.