Island geopoetics and the postcolonial discourse of Sardinia in German-language literature

From the second half of the 17th century onwards, Sardinia has fascinated many German-speaking travelers and writers, whose works have given rise to a particular literary tradition, based on a prismatic image of this island. Through a large and often unexplored corpus, consisting of travelogues, diaries, novels, short stories, and poetry, a specific literary discourse of the island has been constructed over the centuries, and Sardinia has acquired the distorted image of either a waste land, an exile, and prison, or an uncorrupted paradise, where human beings can still retrieve a deep relationship with the Earth. This paper aims to give an account of this discourse to highlight, from a diachronic perspective, the construction of the image of an island more or less influenced by a Eurocentric perspective. Using a geopoetic approach, several texts are analysed in a hermeneutic process which outlines not only the island’s colonial past, but also the construction of a recent neocolonial project made up of uncontrolled urbanization, industrialization, mass tourism, and (nuclear) pollution.