This chapter examines three of the dominant binaries by which islands have been understood and bifurcated: reality and fantasy, utopia and dystopia, isolation and connection. It provides some of the key issues for literary studies in the context of island studies where 'the island' is uniquely poised between real and imaginary domains. Islands have played a fundamental role in the construction of modern literary forms. In Le livre des îles, French literary historian and Renaissance specialist, Frank Lestringant, shows the ways in which maps, which pre-date fiction in many instances, also conditioned the emergence, organisation and reading of literature. Western thought has long imagined island connectedness, as is clear in the ancient term 'archipelago' to designate the Aegean, which was renamed Adalar Denizi – ea of islands – n the Ottoman period. The suggestive power of the archipelago is central to the thought of Martinican poet, philosopher and theorist Edouard Glissant, and more specifically to his poetics of relation.