The crisis over Brexit has deep roots in a central trope of the English imagination: islands. Trace it back to John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II – “this little world / This precious stone set in the silver sea / Which serves it in the office of a wall … This blessed plot” – and then follow the sequence of iconic titles from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe right down to the Lord of the Flies. Being an island has been a central part of English nationalism and generations of children (including, famously, David Cameron) learnt their history from HE Marshall’s Our Island Story, despite the title of that book being based on two obvious mistakes: England shares an island with two other nations, and Great Britain is actually an archipelago of 5,000 islands. English nationalism struggles with plurals, and for writers, the island trope has offered an easy way to pluck the heart strings of English sensibility.

Islands offer a fantasy of escape, of retreat and of remaking the world anew. In A Journey to the Western Isles, Samuel Johnson, that unsung architect of British nationalism, frequently admitted to Crusoe fantasies. As Boswell reported about one island visit, “Dr Johnson liked the idea and talked of how he would build a house there, how he would fortify it, how he would have cannon, how he would plant, how he would sally out and take the isle of Muck and then he laughed with uncommon glee.” Johnson’s fantasy is one of development – building, gardening in Crusoe style - an assertion of agency in novel territory, the imperial template. Islands are places of refuge but also a secure base for aggression, as Johnson’s contemporaries were well aware as they embarked on the process of building an empire out of islands from Malta to Singapore.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Basil Radford in the film of Whisky Galore. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Perhaps one of the most successful island stories of all time has been Whisky Galore. The black and white 1949 film of Compton Mackenzie’s novel invariably features in Christmas TV schedules with its cast of lovable rogues and its shipwreck booty of 250,000 cases of premium whisky. Mackenzie spent a good part of his life as a devoted islophile, living at different times in Capri, Herm, Jethou in the Channel Islands and the Hebridean Shiants before arriving in Barra. His novel reads as a love letter to islands, as he affectionately portrays their necessary tolerance, pragmatism and resourcefulness as residents are forced into intimate neighbourliness. Above all, he loved island’s often anarchic spirit, and defiance of distant centres of power. What is obscured in the film is the novel’s utopian vision of how the island brings reconciliation – between Catholic and Protestant and between England and Scotland. The island fosters the sense of “all being in this together”.

DH Lawrence had little time for such dewy-eyed nonsense in The Man Who Loved Islands, a novella believed to have been inspired by Mackenzie. The hero sets out in the tradition of Crusoe to build his “little world” on an island, but his plans founder amid acrimony, and he moves to a smaller island to start again, only to repeat the bitter story and having invested and lost his fortune, finally he retreats alone to a tiny windswept barren island, half crazed. Lawrence mocks the vain ambition of creating a utopia; the desire to detach from the complexity and shortcomings of the world drives the protagonist mad. The story could serve as a Brexit allegory, a point not lost on Patrick Barkham in his non-fiction book, Islander, where he uses Lawrence as the touchpoint for a tour of a few of the 130 inhabited islands in the British archipelago, delving into the strange and compelling histories of islands as diverse as St Kilda, Alderney and the Isle of Man.

Islands have a tendency to be self-referential, even small minded, a point made by both Andrea Levy and Bill Bryson, in their titles for books on Britain (Small Island and Notes from a Small Island). Perhaps my favourite of this island literature is the haunting Concrete Island by JG Ballard. An island is much more than a geographical entity: it can be a state of mind, or one can suddenly be marooned by an unexpected turn of events, so that islands lurk in many shapes and situations, even in the heart of a city. An architect is driving home when his car crashes and plunges into wasteland, where he is trapped. As he searches for escape, water and food, he discovers he is not alone and the feeling of danger builds ... After reading this, no journey over a spaghetti junction has ever been quite the same; I find myself gripping the steering wheel tightly.

• Madeleine Bunting’s novel Island Song is published by Granta (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.