Islands have always been spaces for new political configurations, testing grounds for revolutionary technologies, and sites of both penal colonies and utopian visions. But since early modernity, isolation has also served as a metaphor for the condition of modern literature: a solitary practice, ruled by autonomous laws, and cut off from the mainland of everyday life.This book offers a comparative analysis of the trope of isolation in (North and South) American and English literature, thinking of the island as a figure of resistance. More than considering islands in a merely geological sense, they are viewed from a rhetorical perspective: as literary spaces - uncharted, out of time, languageless, these isolated islands can only take place in literature.The authors on Diaz's archipelago include Cabeza de Vaca, More, Bacon, Shakespeare, Defoe, Swift, Darwin, Melville, Rod., Ortiz, H.G. Wells, Bioy Casares, Lezama Lima, Pi.

era, and Arenas.