Insular Arcadias: Islands in the Great War Fiction of J.‑M. G. Le Clézio and Pat Barker

Autor

  • Anna Branach-Kallas Nicolaus Copernicus University

Abstrakt

The aim of my article is to explore the representation of the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues in The Prospector (1985) by French writer Jean‑Marie Gustave Le Clézio and of the Solomon Islands in the Regeneration trilogy (1991—1995) by a British writer Pat Barker. Both Le Clézio and Barker use and challenge the pastoral recourses belonging to the tradition of Great War writing and the convention of idealising remote Arcadian lands. Several insular myths are thus undermined by the two writers, who thus resituate remote islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as integral parts of European modernity.

Key words:  island, Mauritius, Rodrigues, Solomon Islands, Eddystone Island, Great War, pastoral, modernity

Biogram autora

Anna Branach-Kallas - Nicolaus Copernicus University

Anna Branach‑Kallas (PhD, D.Litt.) is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. She is the author of Uraz przetrwania. Trauma i polemika z mitem pierwszej wojny światowej w powieści kanadyjskiej [The Trauma of Survival: The (De)Construction of the Myth of the Great War in the Canadian Novel] (2014), which was awarded a Pierre Savard Award. She has also published Corporeal Itineraries: Body, Nation, Diaspora in Selected Canadian Fiction (2010) and In the Whirlpool of the Past: Memory, Intertextuality and History in the Fiction of Jane Urquhart (2003) and over 60 essays, which express a range of interests from intertextuality and historiography to corporeality, trauma, war, and postcolonialism. She has also (co‑)edited several essay collections, including Re‑Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture (2015). Since 2009, she has directed the Canadian Studies Resource Center at Nicolaus Copernicus University. Currently, she is director of a comparative project devoted to the analysis of representations of the Great War in contemporary Great War fiction in England, France, and Canada.

Bibliografia

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Jak cytować

Branach-Kallas, A. Insular Arcadias: Islands in the Great War Fiction of J.‑M. G. Le Clézio and Pat Barker. Romanica Silesiana, 10(1). Pobrano z https://trrest.vot.pl/ojsus/index.php/RS/article/view/5968

Numer

Dział

Paradis / enfer comme métaphore de l’île