ABSTRACT
Like Treasure Island, which provides its seminal intertext, Arthur Quiller-Couch's Poison Island (1907) is posited upon the role of the map as both sign and riddle. The English party may be viewed as entering 'the space of the other not to discover its unique history', but rather to restage European national identity, 'to witness the triumph of the English spirit unencumbered by the disease of industrialism'. Faced with the challenge of the Tory New Imperialists, the party turned its fire on the mercenary motivation disclosed by colonial policy in southern Africa, as Porter explains: The Boer War stimulated a flood of propaganda against 'capitalist imperialism' never equalled in England subsequently. Quiller-Couch therefore concludes by enunciating the three tenets which informed the promulgation of a School of English at Cambridge: that literature cannot be divorced from 'life'; a biographical understanding is essential to literary study; and the writing and speaking of English are a living art.
