“Literature, Location, Translation: Island Report”

A talk by Visiting Hurst Professor Ástráður Eysteinsson

This talk will use the island as a starting point in examining literary culture and literary history. Islands and archipelagos have frequently functioned as “laboratories”: places containing useful information about natural and cultural phenomena in a broader planetary context. An island culture like that of Iceland might seem to have thrived on isolation, but a closer look at its literary culture reveals that it has been a place of translation from the start, one that provides insights into the important but shaky connections and hierarchies of centers and peripheries, continents and islands, local customs and cultural contacts, tradition and modernity, national canons and world literature.