Ballard, Sexual Landscapes and Nature

Ballard’s writing in the period between The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash reveals deep interest in the status of the natural in contemporary culture, and his fictionalising of a landscape that is ‘denatured’. Exploring the 1971 Harley Cokeliss television documentary Crash!, the interview with Lynn Barber and an item of Ballard’s contemporary reading reveals a context in which ideas of nature emerge in connection with debates about the cultural representation of sex, gender and desire. The development of this configuration of ideas is then explored in the later autobiographical fiction, The Kindness of Women, and the later environmental satire Rushing to Paradise where ideas of and assumptions about gender and the natural are further disturbed and brought into an environmental frame.