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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. Introducing the Liquid Modern Desert Island

Author : Barney Samson

Published in: Desert Islands and the Liquid Modern

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This introductory chapter is structured around two watery concepts: the etymology of the word ‘island’ as watery land and Zygmunt Bauman’s theorisation of the liquid modern. Difficulties arise when one interrogates the idea of a ‘desert island.’ What is an island? What does it mean to be desert(ed)? Who counts as an inhabitant? The introduction surveys and then complicates various contradictory meanings that have been attached to desert islands in post-war popular culture, outlines the critical context and groundwork of the following chapters and summarises the book’s argument.

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next chapter (In)Coherent Desert Islands: Desert Island Discs and Bounty Chocolate in Print
Footnotes
1
For further discussion of colonial and neocolonial urges in desert island representations, see Loxley (1990), Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (2006, 2007), and Fuller (2016).
 
2
For a discussion of “the identities and potential new roles of [shipwreck] survivors” in the modern era, see Morrison (2014, 4).
 
3
The collection Shipwreck and Island Motifs in Literature and the Arts examines situations in which a protagonist “has to revisit her/his sense of self in relation to the new environment” (LeJuez and Springer 2015, 2).
 
4
Cf. Riquet (2019) on mobilised and destabilised island representations.
 
5
Bauman notes that “the ‘modernity discourse’” has conceived of modernity as “a process of ‘liquefaction’ from the start.” In the solid modern era, though, this was “not in order to do away with the solids once and for all … but to clear the site for new and improved solids” (2006, 3–4).
 
6
Bauman later rejected the term “postmodernity” as “erroneous” (2014, 90); this book discusses the contemporary era in terms of “liquid modernity” and references Bauman’s theoretical writing from before and after his coining of that term.
 
7
See Riquet (2016) and Samson (2020) for further discussion of cold islands.
 
8
For a discussion of ideology and spatial practice in Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies, see Samson (2018).
 
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Metadata
Title
Introducing the Liquid Modern Desert Island
Author
Barney Samson
Copyright Year
2020
Book
Desert Islands and the Liquid Modern

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-57045-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-57046-0

Copyright Year: 2020

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57046-0_1