Saltwater Chronicles: Reading Representational Spaces in Selected Book Clubs in St. John's, Newfoundland

• Published in: Island Studies Journal
• Main Authors: Judith P. Robertson, David Lewkowich, Jennifer Rottmann
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Island Studies Journal 2010
• Subjects: Physical geography; GB3-5030; Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.242; https://doaj.org/article/c98cf5f3a1434ac69d59d31e4a7af2f4

_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.