An innovative volume of interdisciplinary essays on the significant British writer J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), exploring the physical, cultural and intertextual landscapes in several key novels with a central focus on
The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), one of the most challenging texts in contemporary literature. Contributors include established critics of Ballard alongside newcomers. Different spatial concepts underpin the essays, from the landscapes of Ballard’s youth in Shanghai and his life in suburban London, to nuclear testing spaces and outer space exploration. Figurative locations typical of Ballard’s work are explored, including the beach, the motorway, the high-rise and the shopping mall. Textual spaces are explored through Ballard’s affiliation with modernist literary forms, including surrealist prose writing and collage, and poetic romanticism.
Richard Brown is Reader in Modern Literature in the School of English at the University of Leeds and the author of much academic work on James Joyce including
A Companion to James Joyce (Blackwell, 2008) and on contemporary writers ranging from Ian McEwan to Bob Dylan. His essay “Reading J.G. Ballard after the Millennium: the Scars of
Crash, Cocaine Nights and Millennium People” appeared in the Millennial Fictions special issue of
Critical Engagements (Autumn/Winter 2008).
Christopher Duffy is a doctoral candidate at the University of Leeds working on a thesis titled “Heterotopic Space in Selected Works of J. G. Ballard”. He has taught English Literature at the University of Leeds.
Elizabeth Stainforth is a doctoral candidate at the University of Leeds. Her research explores memory’s significance for cultural heritage in the wake of digital technologies. She has worked as a researcher and University teacher and librarian and is one of the editors of the journal
parallax.
Author Biographies
List of Figures
Standard Abbreviations
Introduction
Fay Ballard – Shanghai/Shepperton
1. Graham Matthews – J. G. Ballard and the Drowned World of Shanghai
2. Thomas Knowles – Aeolian Harps in the Desert: Romanticism and Vermilion Sands
3. Catherine McKenna – Zones of Non-Time: Residues of Iconic Events in Ballard’s Fiction
4. Andrew Warstat – Speeding to the Doldrums: Stalled Futures and the Disappearance of Tomorrow in “The Dead Astronaut”
5. Richard Brown – Jarry, Joyce and the Apocalyptic Intertextuality of The Atrocity Exhibition
6. Guglielmo Poli – Geometries of the Imagination: The Map-Territory Relation in
The Atrocity Exhibition
7. Elizabeth Stainforth – “The Logic of the Visible at the Service of the Invisible”: Reading Invisible Literature in The Atrocity Exhibition
8. Christopher Duffy – Hidden Heterotopias in Crash
9. William Fingleton – Pillars of the Community: The Tripartite Characterisation of High-Rise
10. Jeanette Baxter – Fascisms and the Politics of Nowhere in Kingdom Come
Index
All interested in J.G. Ballard, contemporary literature and culture, and anyone concerned with literary representations of space, intertextuality, and the visual arts.