J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions

by Baxter, Jeannette; Wymer, Rowland

• ISBN13: 9780230278127
• ISBN10: 0230278124
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Providing an extensive reassessment of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard's writing, including historical violence, pornography, post 9/11 politics, and urban space, this book also engages with Ballard's 'late' modernism; his experimentation with style and form; and his sustained interests in psychology and psychopathology.

Author Biography

JEANNETTE BAXTER is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. She is the author of J. G. Ballard's Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Ashgate 2009); editor of J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Continuum 2008); co-editor of W.G. Sebald: Critical Essays (Manchester 2012), and author of numerous essays in the areas of literary modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary British fiction. 
 
ROWLAND WYMER is a Professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His publications include Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (1986), Webster and Ford (1995), and Derek Jarman (2005), as well as a number of co-edited collections of essays, including Neo-Historicism (2000) and The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (2006). He is currently working on a book on science fiction and religion and editing The Witch of Edmonton for the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of John Ford.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: J.Baxter& R.Wymer
PART I: 'FICTIONS OF EVERY KIND': FORM AND NARRATIVE
Ballard's Story of O: 'The Voices of Time' and the Quest for (Non)Identity; R.Wymer
Ballard/Atrocity/Conner/Exhibition/Assemblage; R.Luckhurst
Uncanny Forms: Reading Ballard's 'Non-Fiction'; J.Baxter
PART II: ' THE ANGLE BETWEEN TWO WALLS': SEX, GEOMETRY AND THE BODY
Pornographic Geometries: The Spectacle as Pathology and as Therapy in The Atrocity Exhibition; J.H.Bon Hua
Disaffection and Abjection in J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash; E.Whiting
Chapter Six: Reading Posture and Gesture in Ballard's Novels; D.O'Hara
PART III: 'BABYLON REVISITED': BALLARD'S LONDONS
The Texture of Modernity in J. G. Ballard's Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise; S.Groes
J. G. Ballard and William Blake: Historicizing the Reprobate Imagination; A.Cormack
Late Ballard; D.James
PART IV: 'THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL': PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOPATHOLOGY
Empires of the Mind: Autobiography and Anti-imperialism in the Work of J.G. Ballard; I.Paddy 
'Going mad is their only way of staying sane': The Civilized Violence of J. G. Ballard; J.Carter Wood
The Madness of Crowds: Ballard's Experimental Communities; J.Huntley
'Uncentred Lives': Micronationalism in the Work of J. G. Ballard; S.Sellars
Index