Islandology is a fast-paced, fact-filled comparative essay in critical topography and cultural geography that cuts across different cultures and argues for a world of islands. The book explores the logical consequences of geographic place for the development of philosophy and the study of limits (Greece) and for the establishment of North Sea democracy (England and Iceland), explains the location of military hot-spots and great cities (Hormuz and Manhattan), and sheds new light on dozens of world-historical productions whose motivating islandic aspect has not heretofore been recognized (Shakespeare's Hamlet and Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung). Written by Shell in view of the melting of the world's great ice islands, Islandology shows not only new ways that we think about islands but also why and how we think by means of them.
"Islandology is a compendium, a word and image album, a guide bleu, and a piece of theory all rolled into one. In its dense and playful disposition of islandological lexemes, examples, paradigms, facts, language games, the book is a voracious post modernist cosmography. Shell, a cosmographer for the Internet era, exposes a poignant transcendental restlessness in his conceptual and literary mapping
Trent University
"Islandology is one of those rare works that perfectly reflects its object of study. Instead of being a contribution to a particular field of research, it is an island of scholarship that allows us to chart submerged connections among such fields as cultural geography, literary analysis, and socio-political inquiry."
Northwestern University
"Islandology is one of the most remarkable books you will read in a long time and is thoroughly recommended to all who wish to inquire into how geography is enmeshed in the human imagination"
