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Abstract: Saltwater Chronicles investigates the notion of "islandness" in contemporary Newfoundland readership through two in-depth case studies of book clubs as representational spaces in the elaboration of local knowledge and identities. We demonstrate how select Newfoundland readers perform acts of regeneration in which the lived, loved, and experiential dimensions of literary space come to invoke the permeability of psychic and geographic borders, the dangers and possibilities of the landwash, and the always-already precarious designation of limits between self and other. We provide examples of how, for these island readers, "islandness" as a symbolic point of address slips and border-crosses in the in-between semiotic spaces of literary encounter.
Keywords: islandness, book culture, literacy studies, Newfoundland, borders, landwash
© 2010: Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
Introduction
In his desire to write a "real world literary criticism" where place is read alongside literature in order to imbue reading experience with cultural meaning, Ian Marshall conjures "an ecology of reading," in which "life, literature, and theory interconnect and merge in a meaningful way, everything hitched to everything else" (1998: 71, 8). Marshall, a professor-cum-literary pilgrim, strikes out in solitude through the Appalachian Trail, filling the element with literary heroes and the echo soundings of local readers. By drawing wide the circle of "literature and land" (ibid.: 102), his signatures lend exteriority and intimacy to his private readings. His presence on a map of geographical spaces invites him to come out of himself, and he realizes that "place matters as much as plot" (ibid.: 66) in literary theory. Marshall reflects on how boundaries entangle and blur in the reading process. His use of geography and space as vectors of meaning in his cultural study of the everyday demonstrates, not only how knowledge and lives are organized and maintained in highly localized ways that extend sedimentary knowledge, but how research that expresses the fluidity of these operations under the conditions of their interconnectedness can challenge the way reading is characterized.
Like Marshall, we undertake here a "real world literary criticism" of how particular book cultures take root (and routes) out of the landwash-where water, as a fundamental and life-sustaining force, both nourishes human life as its drift simultaneously produces disorientation and catastrophe-of everyday psycho-geographical spaces...