Island Studies Journal 10(1), Book Reviews

With the publication of this book, we can now add islandology to nissology and island studies as yet another term vying to be the accepted label for this emerging interdisciplinary field.Marc Shell's Islandology is an ambitious and comprehensive review of the etymology, history and philosophy of islands, as reflected in the humanities.Shell notes that the term islandology originated with the 1945 Washington-based American Institute of Islandology.He defines the term variously as the "discourse that marks off human beings not only as children of the main, understood not only as both 'land' and 'sea' but also as creatures of the natural shore who inhabit, at once, both positive and negative space" (p.4), as "the rhetoric of speaking about islands and to the science [italics in original] of islands" (p.7) and finally as involving "less the fact of being an island -since what landmass is not an island?-than the hypothesis that there are different ways of conceiving the natural insular condition in terms both political and individual" (p.247).The book is presented in four parts.The first is an exercise in etymology, including an extended discussion of definitions of islands and related terms, a description of real and metaphorical islands, as well as occasions where islands are represented in the 'vertical' and the 'horizontal' planes.Islands in the vertical plane would include tidal changes, plate tectonics, land bridges and sea-level changes.Horizontal planes might be 'land surrounded by water', ancient thinkers' views of Earth as a part of the Milky Way and archipelagos.Interestingly, this section and those that follow make extensive use of the 'island as metaphor' theme with no reference to the critical, ongoing debate about the usefulness of these metaphorical applications.The second section of the book consists of a description of islands in various geographic spaces and places and the human constructions of these islands.These include, for example, utopian islands in literature (e.g., Huxley's Island and More's Utopia) and in reality (e.g., Venice, Hormuz).The third and fourth parts of the book, which comprise almost half of its contents, consist of two case study sections.The first is an analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet, studied from an islandness perspective.Although the word 'islandness' is used here, the reader is not made aware that this is very much a value-laden word in scholarly research, wherein a comprehensive body of work has attempted to understand islandness from a variety of perspectives.The second case study is a deconstruction of the island-themed work of German authors, poets and composers, undertaken in order to better understand the influence these works may have had on the political and cultural development of the 20 th century German state.Following these four sections, Shell has provided an 18-page 'postamble'.I found this to be an odd assortment of thoughts and ideas that seemed to not quite fit the subject matter of the previous four sections.The most notable feature in this concluding section is a commentary on the contributions and links to island contexts by some of the more prominent historical geographers of the time, including Mackinder, Ratzel and Haushofer.The 82 illustrations and figures contained in this text provide a richness to the portrayal of islands in various media that is rarely, if ever, seen in other island studies writing.In fact, the level of detail, the meticulous research, and the scope and scale of examples provided in this book is nothing short of amazing.For example, Shell estimates that he has referenced more than 800 islands and 200 bodies of water.The danger inherent in this breadth is that a

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