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J. G. Ballard Contemporary Critical Perspectives

edited by Jeannette Baxter

This is an up-to-date reader of critical essays on J. G. Ballard by leading international academics, which includes a short biography, timeline and comprehensive guided further reading.

  • Imprint: Continuum
  • Series: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
  • Pub. date: 12 Feb 2009
  • ISBN: 9780826497260
176 Pages, paperback World rights
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Description

J.G. Ballard is one of the most significant British writers of the contemporary period. His award-winning novels are widely studied and read, yet the appeal of Ballard’s idiosyncratic, and often controversial, imagination is such that his work also enjoys something of a cult status with the reading public. The hugely successful cinematic adaptations of Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987) and Crash (Cronenberg, 1996) further confirm Ballard’s unique place within the literary, cultural and popular imaginations.

This guide includes new critical perspectives on Ballard’s major novels as well as his short stories and journalistic writing covering issues of form, narrative and experimentation. Whilst offering fresh readings of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard’s writing, including history, sexuality, violence, consumer capitalism, and urban space,the contributors also explore Ballard’s contribution to major contemporary debates including those surrounding post 9/11 politics, terrorism, neo-imperialism, science, morality and ethics.

Table of Contents

General Editors’ Foreword
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Chronology or a Version of J. G. Ballard’s Life
Foreword by Toby Litt
Introduction: J. G. Ballard and the Contemporary, Jeannette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge)
1. The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard's short fiction and science fiction of the 1960s, Brian Baker (Lancaster University)
2. Disquieting Features: An Introductory Tour to The Atrocity Exhibition, Jake Huntley (University of East Anglia)
3. The Gothic, the Body, and the Failed Homeopathy Argument: Reading Crash, Victor Sage (University of East Anglia)
4. Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard, Corin Depper (Kingston University)
5. Mind is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard's ‘Life Trilogy’ as War Literature, Umberto Rossi (Rome)
6. From Shanghai to Shepperton: Crises of Representation in J. G. Ballard’s Londons, Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope University)
7. Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, Jeannette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge)
8. The Possibilities of Sacrifice, the Certainties of Trauma: J. G. Ballard's Postmillenial Fiction, Philip Tew (Brunel University)
Afterword by Toby Litt
Interview with J.G. Ballard by Jeannette Baxter
Further Reading
Index

Author(s)

Jeannette Baxter,

Jeannette Baxter is Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, specializing in modern and contemporary fiction.

Reviews

"The extraordinary fictions of J. G. Ballard, so long overlooked by the academy, are finally beginning to get the academic criticism they deserve. This collection offers a host of incisive essays, sandwiched between Toby Litt's meditations on Ballard's work and an interview with Ballard himself, who cheerfully announces the arrival of a new Dark Age -- by fax, weirdly enough. In between, diverse critical voices cover Ballard's fiction from the sixties to the noughties, from SF to crime, from future apocalypse to domestic memoir. A very worthy addition to the scholarship of one of the post-war era's most important writers."- Professor Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London.

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"J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives may be the most critically capacious and insightful volume yet devoted to this sui generis author whose work spans the past half-century. It is the ideal companion for scholars and teachers of Ballard’s endlessly intriguing, evolving, challenging, controversial fictions.’- Professor Brian W. Shaffer, Rhodes College, USA

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