ABSTRACT
In the era of antiquity, islands were speculative utopias, "no-places" that were rumoured to exist elsewhere that were perceived to be idealized landscapes for the settlement and development of human society. From the 14th century onward, advances in navigation and sailing technologies enabled European explorers to travel further than ever before, which brought them in to contact with previously unreachable oceans. In much the same way that "writers did much to encourage such superb fantasies" about islands, so too were islands "being discovered all over the world and were exciting the readers of diaries, letters and reports from early mariners". The global West's fascination for and obsession with desert islands, or "islomania", reached its apex from the mid-18th century until approximately the mid-to-late 19th century. Due to the sheer saturation of the Robinsonade genre for most of the 19th century, there was a dearth of fictional and imaginary islands within mainstream culture for the first half of the 20th century.
