Lisa Fletcher

'Island Genres, Genre Islands' moves the debate about literature and place onto new ground by exploring the island settings of bestsellers. Through a focus on four key genres—crime fiction, the spy thriller, popular romance fiction, and fantasy fiction—Crane and Fletcher show that genre is fundamental to both the textual representation of real and imagined islands and to actual knowledges and experiences of the ‘geospace’ of islands. The book offers broad, comparative readings of the significance of islandness in each of the four genres as well as detailed case studies of major authors and texts. These include chapters on Agatha’s Christie’s islands, the role of the island in ‘Bondspace,’ the romantic islophilia of Nora Roberts’ Three Sisters Island series, and the archipelagic geography of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. Crane and Fletcher’s book will appeal to specialists in literary studies and cultural geography, as well as in island studies.

REVIEWS
The key is that the island, its geography, and the island geography are integral to the fiction, being used as settings yet much more: as metaphors, to generate moods, to convey visions, and often (argued by Crane and Fletcher) to create a story that could not have happened without an/the island. This argument is forcefully persuasive by being seamlessly interwoven with key theories, concepts, and literature from island studies.
Ilan Kelman, Social and Cultural Geography

Published in the innovative Rethinking the Island Series (edited by Elaine Stratford, Godfrey Baldacchino and Elizabeth McMahon), a key argument of this book is that island studies cannot be separated from a concern with the textual life of islands. As such, there is a need to further expand our understanding of this textual life beyond the confines of high culture (studying Agatha Christie as well as Shakespeare, James Bond as well as Édouard Glissant).The central argument is that ‘thinking about islands can help us better understand popular genres and reading genre novels can help us rethink islands’ (p. xvi).
Jonathan Pugh, Cultural Geographies

'[E]ven as a diverse range of critical tools are emerging, the relationship between islands and popular fiction has so far not been subjected to any detailed or systematic analysis. This was a notable gap in the field and something in need of being addressed. I am pleased to say that the authors of Island genres, genre islands are more than up to the task."
- Jonathan Pugh, Island Studies Journal
http://www.islandstudies.ca/sites/default/files/ISJReviewCraneFletcherIslandGenres.pdf

Like a cruise liner, Crane and Fletcher’s Island Genres, Genre Islands takes its readers on a journey around various genre islands, making brief stops at selected ports. While the cruise experience would be enriched by disembarking from the ship and spending more time onshore at crime atoll, thriller island, the isle of popular romance, and the archipelago of fantasy, or by having visited them previously, the on-board lecture programme ensures that all travellers will return home feeling more knowledgeable about the differences between them and convinced that “[p]opular fiction offers […] a potent site for identifying and unpacking habits of thinking about distinctive natural environments” (xi).
-Laura Vivanco, Journal of Popular Romance Studies
http://jprstudies.org/2018/07/review-island-genres-genre-islands-conceptualisation-and-representation-in-popular-fiction-by-ralph-crane-and-lisa-fletcher/

"This is a highly original and hugely readable book, offering detailed readings of texts by all our favourite genre writers, from Agatha Christie to Ursula K. Le Guin. It is the Island focus, however, that really secures its significance. The range of islands is genuinely global, the intellectual ‘reach’ both serious and innovative, and the research-base impressive. I loved it."
- Lucie Armitt, Professor of Contemporary English Literature, University of Lincoln, UK.

"Atlantis, Avalon, Utopia, Lilliput, Treasure Island, and so on: fictional islands have always captivated the literary imagination. Unsurprisingly, then, the study of the insula in popular fiction presents a unique perspective upon the literary geography of this evocative space. In Island Genres, Genre Islands, Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher explore the fascinating relations between the representative site of the island and popular genre fiction. Focusing on four distinctive genres—crime fiction, thrillers, romance, and fantasy—Crane and Fletcher disclose the effects of the insular locale on a number of bestsellers, and thus offer a major contribution to studies of popular culture, spatiality, and comparative literature."
- Robert T. Tally Jr., Texas State University

To enter caves is to venture beyond the realm of the everyday. From huge vaulted caverns to impassable water-filled passages, the karst topography of Guilin in China and the lava tubes of Hawaii, from tiny remote pilgrimage sites to massive tourism enterprises, caves are places of mystery. Dark spaces that remain largely unexplored, caves are astonishing wonders of nature and habitats for exotic flora and fauna. This book investigates the natural and cultural history of caves and considers the roles they have played in the human imagination and experience of the natural world. It explores the long history of the human fascination with caves, across countries and continents, examining their dual role as spaces of both wonder and fear. In Cave we encounter the adventurers and 'cave hunters' who pioneered the science of caves, and the explorers and cave divers still searching for new, unnavigated routes deep into the earth. This book explores the lure of the subterranean world by examining caving and cave tourism and by looking to the mythology, literature and art of caves.This lavishly illustrated book will appeal to general readers and experts alike interested in the ecology and use of caves, or the extraordinary artistic responses earth's dark recesses have evoked over the centuries.

Shortlisted for the Tratman Award 2015: "Cave is unusual in that it succeeds in crossing divides, merging legend and fact, science and art – any caver willing to be challenged with new ideas will enjoy this book."

"The poetic language of the book conjures this dark and mysterious subterranean world for the reader’s consideration; a bizarre world like no other, for ‘every map or model we have of a cave is a pictorial reconstruction of a place that one can only actually see and experience in fragments’.  And presumably, only then if you are intrepid enough to risk it. [...] The book presents much food for thought, and left me pondering the subject for several days.  Surely, the mark of a ‘Good Read’." Catherine Kenny, Geoscientist Online (https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Geoscientist/Books-Arts/Geoscientist-book-reviews-online/2016-Book-Reviews-Online/Cave-Nature-and-Culture)

"Cave Nature and Culture is an insightful and historical look at caves from various points of our history that includes a variety of genres from science to mythology and even tourism. If you are fascinated by the history of caves then this tome is definitely a must read!" James Wright, Impulse Gamer (http://www.impulsegamer.com/cave-nature-and-culture-book-review/)

"Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher [...] offer not so much an exploration of caves themselves, but rather an exploration of the ways in which we experience caves. This is, quite literally, an anthropomorphic venture. As the authors point out, we define caves largely through the human experience of them. [...] This book provides an intriguing opening into that poorly understood underground world and the mysteries and secrets (both imagined and real) that lie deep within it." Danielle Clode, Australian Book Review

"This book does not fit into one of the usual moulds for cave literature, being neither a treatise on the science of caves and karst, a historical account nor a cavers’ manual. Rather, it examines the position of caves in our culture in the broadest of senses and with some considerable success. [...] It is beautifully produced and illustrated, interesting to read and deserves a place on the bookshelf of most cavers and speleologists." Stephen K. Donovan, Cave and Karst Science, The Transactions of the British Cave Research Association

Three teenage boys, the sole survivors of a shipwreck, find themselves marooned on a deserted island in the South Pacific. With little more than a telescope and a broken knife, the youths must find food and shelter and learn to survive. But though the coral island is a tropical paradise, full of natural beauty and exotic fruits and wildlife, dangers and adventures abound: sharks, pirates, and even bloodthirsty cannibals!

Scottish-born R.M. Ballantyne (1825-1894) wrote more than ninety books for young people during the Victorian era, the most famous of which is The Coral Island (1857), a tale whose popularity has proved so enduring that it has never been out of print. A thrilling story in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe and a key influence on later classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, The Coral Island is presented here in a new scholarly edition that includes the unabridged text of the first British edition, a new introduction and notes by Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher, and the original illustrations by the author.

The cultural and commercial operations of the publishing industry
have been dramatically reshaped by digital technologies, yet little
is known about how these effects are differentiated across sectors
of the industry. This article analyses data about the production of
Australian-authored fantasy, romance and crime fiction titles to
explore the specific publishing ecosystems of different genres and
the roles played by multinational, small press and self-publishing
in each. First, we show that there has been across-the-board
growth in each genre and for each type of publisher. Second, we
argue that multinational publishing activity in these genres has
been characterized by broad stability, punctuated by experimentation
with genre-specific imprints for romance and fantasy titles.
Third, we find that small presses make diverse contributions to
genre ecosystems, able to both activate prestige and experiment
with formats. Finally, we note the immense growth in self-publishing,
particularly in romance, and argue that self-publishing now
operates in tandem with traditional publishing to create hybridized
publishing ecosystems - with greater potential to transform
the traditional publishing model than e-books.

Popular romance fiction constitutes a commercial, social and textual
formation. Extending Howard Becker’s model of “art worlds,” we term this
formation a “genre world,” in which texts are produced through
cooperative networks. This article uses industry data, interviews and
textual analysis relating to selected contemporary Australian novels to
identify three key features of the romance genre world: an awareness of
national and international markets; clear processes of professionalization;
and a sociality embracing historical, living and fictional participants. This
model accounts for diverse conventions within the genre world of romance,
while acknowledging its coherence as an industrial, social and textual
system.

Of all disciplines, literary studies has the most entrenched model of academic authorship - the sole author – yet the discipline rarely reflects critically on the implications of this model. This article offers a starting point by reporting on a large-scale study designed to analyse recent co-authorship trends within literary studies. It provides the large-scale data-mining necessary for a longitudinal analysis. Using systematic sampling at five-year intervals between 1995 and 2015, the article examines 51,192 articles listed in the Modern Language Association International Bibliography to determine co-authorship rates in literary studies. The article shows that co-authorship is atypical, at an overall average of just over 4%. There is, however, evidence that co-authorship is becoming more common in the discipline, particularly since 2010. This article canvasses some possible reasons for this increase and concludes that academics in literary studies need to begin explicitly addressing co-authorship traditions and practices in their discipline.

Subterranean environments are stock settings in popular fiction, and they are especially prevalent in thrillers. As “extreme” environments—profoundly non-human and deeply symbolic—the corridors and chambers of deep caves magnify the tensions between space and place as they are typically defined. This chapter argues that consideration of cave settings in popular fiction requires a more nuanced theoretical vocabulary than is currently available. It analyzes three thrillers set partly in deep caves—Clive Cussler’s Inca Gold (1994), David Poyer’s Down to a Sunless Sea (1996), Nevada Barr’s Blind Descent (1998)—and to propose adding a third term to the glossary of spatial literary studies, “anti-place.”

This article provides a comparative study of commercial cave tourism in Australia and China, focussing on the methods of site interpretation and presentation used by selected show caves. The key point of contrast between the commercial speleotourist experiences offered in Australia and China is in the relative priority given to site conservation and framing the cave as a spectacle for the enjoyment of visitors. The discussion draws on the authors’  eld research, visiting show caves as tourists to consider the significance of developments in ecotourism and geotourism for show cave management in Australia and China.

In Robert Penn Warren's poem "Speleology," a young boy turns off his flashlight deep in a cave and knows "darkness and depth and no Time." This poem's powerful imagery of the spatial otherness of caves is the starting point for this article, which argues that analyzing the literary representation of natural subterranean voids requires a careful re-theorisation of the dynamic relations of space and place. The difficult question of how meaning comes to be attached to a particular space, thus transforming it into place, is central to Robert Penn Warren's The Cave and Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, both of which depict male protagonists who retreat underground, albeit for quite different purposes. As Eric Prieto explains, place is a "human relation. There is no set of immanent ontological features adhering to a given site that would allow us to define it as a place." According to the standard definition, a cave is a natural cavity beneath the land large enough to admit a human body, but-as the novels selected for this essay show-caves fascinate and terrify us because they confound human assumptions about our role in assigning meaning to the earth's spaces.

The making of British popular literary culture in the nineteenth century was a visual as well as a textual enterprise. This chapter examines the illustrations of three juvenile adventure novels—G. A. Henty’s With Clive in India, illustrated by Gordon Browne (1884); George Manville Fenn’s Gil the Gunner, illustrated by W. H. Overend (1892); and Frederick P. Gibbon’s The Disputed V.C., illustrated by Stanley L. Wood (1904)— to show the multiple, frequently subtle, and sometimes surprising contributions artists made to a popular genre that reached its apotheosis in the period of British high imperialism.

In The Empire of Nature John M. MacKenzie suggests there were “three animals in India with which the British had a special hunting relationship, the tiger, the elephant and the pig” (179). Of these, the tiger is the one most closely associated with Britain's imperial relationship with India. By the mid nineteenth century, as Joseph Sramek explains, “tigers . . . had become invested with several potent meanings” (659). Several critics including Sramek and Annu Jalais demonstrate how tigers were closely associated with Indian rulers, and, at the same time, with all that was wild and untamed about the subcontinent. Thus “[o]nly by successfully vanquishing tigers would Britons prove their manliness and their fitness to rule over Indians” (Sramek 659). Through close readings of selected tiger images from the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper considers the way tigers were consistently used as visual signifiers of India in a series of stock-in-trade images which depict tiger hunts, white men protecting white women from tigers, and tigers menacing Indians.

This paper focuses on the relationship between written text and image in Henty’s adventure novels set in India. More broadly, it argues for the significance of illustrations in novels by writers such as Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle and asks whether our understanding of late-Victorian popular fiction and its key genres is flawed by the scant attention paid to the contribution of illustrators

This article provides an account of a collaborative teaching and learning project conducted in the English programme at the University of Tasmania in 2015. The project, Blended English, involved the development, implementation, and evaluation of learning and teaching activities using online and mobile technologies for undergraduate English units. The authors draw on the project’s findings from survey and focus group data, and staff reflective practice and peer review, to make the case for increasing technology-enhanced teaching and learning in English literary studies. The blended approach described in this article has the capacity to enhance disciplinary learning; increase accessibility for students in remote and regional areas; facilitate deeper scholarly enquiry; and encourage staff to develop innovative, collaborative, and flexible teaching and learning practices. An appendix presents examples of the project’s practical outcomes, as well as outlines of and reflections on three of the activities developed during the project.

This article tells the story of two projects initiated by the University of Tasmania’s English programme, which were designed to investigate and improve the pathway from pre-tertiary to tertiary English studies in the state: the First Year English Survey (2012-2014) and the Teaching of English in Tasmania Community of Practice (TETCoP). The authors draw on the findings from the survey to show that students in Tasmania who enrol in tertiary English believe that they are progressing their studies in a discipline with which they are already familiar; it seems reasonable to assume that is also the case nationally. The article, then, presents TETCoP as an example of one approach to developing and maintaining productive links between English educators in the senior secondary and tertiary sectors—as a means to encourage others to build on or learn from the work we have done in Tasmania.

Editor (and introduction). Special issue of New Literatures Review 47 on postcolonial island literatures, 2011. 1-16. http://www.islandstudies.ca/NLR2011

Pdfs of each contribution are available below:

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth - Introduction: Of Oceans and Islands

Bragard, Veronique - 'Righting' the Expulsion of Diego Garcia's 'Unpeople': The Island Space as Heterotopia in Literary Texts about the Chagos Islands

Carrigan, Anthony - (Eco)Catastrophe, Reconstruction, and Representation: Montserrat and the Limits of Sustainability

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth - On Kala Pani and Transoceanic Fluids

Fletcher, Lisa -  '…some distance to go': A Critical Review of Island Studies

Heim, Otto - Breath as a Metaphor of Sovereignty and Connectedness in Pacific Island Poetry

Percopo, Luisa - On the Trail of the Post-Colonial: Transcultural Spaces, Cosmopolitanism, and the Islands of the Mediterranean

Savory, Elaine - Utopia, Dystopia and Caribbean Heterotopia: Writing/Reading the Small Island

Sharrad, Paul - Filling the Blanks: Mariquita, a Hybrid Biography from Guam

Sudo, Naoto - Japanese Colonial Representations of the 'South Island': Textual Hybridity, Transracial Love Plots and Postcolonial Consciousness