Saltwater Chronicles: reading representational spaces in selected book clubs in St. John's, Newfoundland

• Main Authors: Jennifer Rottmann, David Lewkowich, Judith P. Robertson
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Island Studies Journal 2010
• Subjects: islandness; book culture; literacy studies; Newfoundland; borders; landwash; Physical geography; GB3-5030
• Online Access: https://doaj.org/article/ece14597f3424d4e9477b247e0aa8359

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.