Alexander Beaumont

During the 1980s, urban space became an important battleground in a confrontation between left and right over the meaning of freedom. While Thatcherism sought to harness the power of the free market to rationalise and reform the inner cities, the response of the 'cultural' left was to celebrate the emancipatory potential of flexible identities and expressive practices associated with urban subcultures. However, through close readings of eight contemporary authors, this book argues that a problematic consequence of the left's experiment with freedom was to elevate exclusion to the status of a political principle and to close down the space of politics itself. It explores how, in less than two decades, the coexistence of flexible cultural identities and urban space has become a virtual impossibility in British fiction. And it suggests that, today, the British novel is frequently marked by structures of failed utopianism, frustrated or incomplete experiments and even withdrawal and quietism, all of which are a consequence of the left's celebration of a cultural politics of disenfranchisement.

This special issue brings together contributions from cultural geographers, design historians and literary scholars analysing J.G. Ballard's 1974 novel Concrete Island (Ballard 2008), in order to situate it within its historical and political contexts and to consider its relevance to contemporary debates on architecture, landscape and cultural practice. Separately and together, the articles gathered here, inter alia, trace the literary genealogies of the novel; illuminate the historical and political contexts that the novel comments on; explicate the ambivalences of the various discursive and technological modernities acting within the narrative; focus on the distinctive island materialities which Ballard sketches throughout the text, and explore the heightened embodied sensibilities through which its architect protagonist, Maitland, navigates this unintentional landscape. In so doing, the articles collected here advance new readings of the novel that build on the extant Ballard...

This special issue brings together contributions from cultural geographers, design historians and literary scholars analysing J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island (Ballard 2008), in order to situate it within its historical and political contexts and to consider its relevance to contemporary debates on architecture, landscape and cultural practice. Separately and together, the articles gathered here, inter alia, trace the literary genealogies of the novel; illuminate the historical and political contexts that the novel comments on; explicate the ambivalences of the various discursive and technological modernities acting within the narrative; focus on the distinctive island materialities which Ballard sketches throughout the text, and explore the heightened embodied sensibilities through which its architect protagonist, Maitland, navigates this unintentional landscape. In so doing, the articles collected here advance new readings of the novel that build on the extant Ballard lit...

This essay argues that the early fiction of J.G. Ballard represents a complex commentary on the evolution of the UK’s technological imaginary which gives the lie to descriptions of the country as an anti-technological society. Such descriptions were lent credence during the postwar period by a perceived crisis in English identity as the British Empire slowly broke apart and the British state appeared to enter a period of decline. Ballard’s work has recently been positioned as an example of this national crisis; however, by reading the representation of landscape in the short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) alongside Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ speech of 1963, and interpreting both in the light of David Edgerton’s complication of declinist interpretations of Britain’s technological revolution, this essay argues that any straightforward attempt to identify Ballard as an example of traumatised Englishness is likely to oversimplify matters. Instead it suggests that, in identifying a ...

This special issue brings together contributions from cultural geographers, design historians and literary scholars analysing J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island (Ballard 2008), in order to situate it within its historical and political contexts and to consider its relevance to contemporary debates on architecture, landscape and cultural practice. Separately and together, the articles gathered here, inter alia, trace the literary genealogies of the novel; illuminate the historical and political contexts that the novel comments on; explicate the ambivalences of the various discursive and technological modernities acting within the narrative; focus on the distinctive island materialities which Ballard sketches throughout the text, and explore the heightened embodied sensibilities through which its architect protagonist, Maitland, navigates this unintentional landscape. In so doing, the articles collected here advance new readings of the novel that build on the extant Ballard lit...

This article examines three recent publications in the field of urban literary studies. It argues that spatiality has become a key term within this discipline, with the inferences of the spatial turn during the 1980s and 1990s having been firmly assimilated with the methodological procedures of textual analysis today. However, the article argues that the textual construction of the relationship between space and identity has not been fully and satisfactorily articulated within the field, with a hard-headedly materialist account of representational space sitting uncomfortably alongside a cultural materialist understanding of identity. This difficulty, it suggests, accounts for some of the theoretical dilemmas represented in the books under discussion, despite their many strengths.

This article argues that David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas equivocates between an optimistic articulation of a global public sphere and a more pessimistic inability to offer its readers a vision in which this public sphere can be realised. I attribute this equivocation to two competing imaginaries within the novel. The first—a cosmopolitan imaginary—wishes to dispense with teleological accounts of human beings, the societies they create and the world in which these societies are located. The second—an emancipatory imaginary—evidences deep concerns regarding the carceral conditions that increasingly dominate the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Mitchell’s text appears to evidence an awareness that the promises of freedom around which neoliberal governance has been instituted look increasingly hollow, and thus that the concept of freedom is ripe for reengagement. However, the fact that freedom represents a telos at odds with the novel’s cosmopolitan ethics produces a pessimistic philosophy of history that forecloses any hope for the realisation of human freedom. The cosmopolitan imaginary of Cloud Atlas thus acts as a brake on its emancipatory imaginary and lends the novel a characteristically cyclical structure in which acts of ethical commitment are stripped of ramification. Finally, the article argues that the impasse between the novel’s competing imaginaries is indicative of a larger challenge confronting cosmopolitan discourse today and suggests that a move beyond the ethical humanism at the heart of this discourse is necessary if an understanding of freedom-as-action is to have any place within it.

This special issue interrogates whether ‘melancholia’ continues to be a useful critical concept with which to analyse the condition of contemporary British and Irish literature. Melancholia was one of the dominant critical preoccupations of the twentieth century, and the term has a long genealogy in which it functions as a synonym for a sadness that has no distinct origin. It connotes a pervasive sense of ‘stuckness’, as if one were caught in the groove of a record. As a result, critical speculation on melancholia can sometimes feel like an exercise in navel-gazing, an unending and therefore beneficent area of inquiry which serves the melancholic subject at its core, and – more to the point – the critic who wishes to write about such a subject. The term itself has something of an in-betweenness to it, being distinguished as a particular variant of depression in DSM-5 but also widely applied to those with a reputation for maudlin introspection, from Hamlet to the Romantics to Morrissey. This indeterminacy is reflected in the stylistic ambiguity of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which appears to be a medical textbook but unfolds as a philosophical investigation, and in the fierce contrasts of John Keats’ ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1819), with its shifting modes of address and juxtaposition of the joyous and sexual alongside much more sober subject matter. Of course, it is Sigmund Freud’s understanding of the term, and particularly his distinction between mourning (in which the ego desires an object that has been lost) and melancholia (in which it mourns an object that is unclear or obscured from it), that has been most influential on theorists of the twentieth century. Freud notes that ‘in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself’ (1917: 246), an idea Jean Laplanche expands on when he considers the place of the object in relation to the melancholic subject: ‘Far from being my kernel, it is the other implanted in me, the metabolized product of the other in me: forever an “internal foreign body”’ (1999: 256). Thus, the melancholic is the subject which has incorporated the lost object into itself. In The Ear of the Other, Derrida discusses this dead object, which ‘remains like a living dead abscessed in a specific spot in the ego […] The dead object is incorporated in this crypt – the term “incorporated” signalling precisely that one has failed to digest or assimilate it totally, so that it remains there, forming a pocket in the mourning body’ (1988: 57). The essays in this special issue are concerned with revealing these pockets of mourning and asking whether, as represented in contemporary British and Irish literature, they continue to have anything to teach us.

This essay argues that the early fiction of J.G. Ballard represents a complex commentary on the evolution of the UK’s technological imaginary which gives the lie to descriptions of the country as an anti-technological society. Such descriptions were lent credence during the postwar period by a perceived crisis in English identity as the British Empire slowly broke apart and the British state appeared to enter a period of decline. Ballard’s work has recently been positioned as an example of this national crisis; however, by reading the representation of landscape in the short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) alongside Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ speech of 1963, and interpreting both in the light of David Edgerton’s complication of declinist interpretations of Britain’s technological revolution, this essay argues that any straightforward attempt to identify Ballard as an example of traumatised Englishness is likely to oversimplify matters. Instead it suggests
that, in identifying a numinous fantasy of technology after technicity, ‘The Terminal Beach’ offers a much more complicated vision of the role of technology in the UK of the 1960s and early 1970s. The significance of Concrete Island lies in how the collision at the outset of the novel marks a move away from this technological imaginary, and a violent
transition into a landscape marked by the immanent practice of technicity rather than a transcendent fantasy of technology after technicity.

This special issue brings together contributions from cultural geographers, design historians and literary scholars analysing J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island (Ballard 2008), in order to situate it within its historical and political contexts and to consider its relevance to contemporary debates on architecture, landscape and cultural practice.
Separately and together, the articles gathered here, inter alia, trace the literary genealogies of the novel; illuminate the historical and political contexts that the novel comments on; explicate the ambivalences of the various discursive and technological modernities acting within the narrative; focus on the distinctive island materialities which Ballard sketches throughout the text, and explore the heightened embodied sensibilities through which its architect protagonist, Maitland, navigates this unintentional landscape. In so doing, the articles collected here advance new readings of the novel that build on the extant Ballard
literature, and the special issue as a whole reasserts the prominence of Concrete Island within the wider contexts of Ballard’s career and the culture of the period in which he was writing. We conclude by suggesting that Ballard’s novel presents us with an anamorphic portrait that complicates and strains contemporaneous narratives of English
modernity, consumer culture and technological progress.

This article examines three recent publications in the field of urban literary studies. It argues that spatiality has become a key term within this discipline, with the inferences of the spatial turn during the 1980s and 1990s having been firmly assimilated with the methodological procedures of textual analysis today. However, the article argues that the textual construction of the relationship between space and identity has not been fully and satisfactorily articulated within the field, with a hard-headedly materialist account of representational space sitting uncomfortably alongside a cultural materialist understanding of identity. This difficulty, it suggests, accounts for some of the theoretical dilemmas represented in the books under discussion, despite their many strengths.