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

Promotional Information

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.

About the Author

Jeannette Baxter, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the author of J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, and her recent co-edited collections include J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions (2012) and A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W. G. Sebald (2013).

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.

"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

... brings together a wonderful range of critical perspectives on Ballard.
*Routledge ABES*

There are substantial and scholarly essays on the influence of surrealism on Ballard, his relation to Baudrillard, his cinematic imagination, the representations of London and other landscapes and the role of violence in his work. A timeline of Ballard's life and an extensive bibliography complete this stimulating volume... Students will find the summaries at the beginning of each chapter a big help.
*The Times Higher Education*