ABSTRACT
Austin Tappan Wright's invented milieu is vividly imagined, practically tangible in its minute attention to topography, history, and culture. Yet Islandia is equally remarkable for its considerations of the epistemology of worlds real and imagined. Within Wright's lifetime, then, fictional imaginary worlds had become genuine domiciles, while the real world of experience was widely recognized as partly a fictional construct. Islandia reflects—and overtly addresses—these changing attitudes toward reality, the imagination, and the nature of imaginary worlds within Western modernity. Islandia highlights how "reality" itself is an imaginary world to some degree, given the inextricability of emotions and the imagination from all perception. It also vividly portrays how imaginary and real worlds can be inhabited simultaneously through the exercise of "double consciousness". Islandia also suggests how imaginary worlds might redress the ills of modernity. Wright's achievement in Islandia is to question the pejorative connotations of "escapism" when it comes to the imagination and imaginary worlds.
