SOURCE: “Allusions in Ballard's The Drowned World,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, July, 1997, pp. 302–10.

In the following essay, McCarthy examines Ballard's use of literary allusions in The Drowned World, including references to works by Joseph Conrad, William Golding, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, John Keats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, and others.

J. G. Ballard's fiction has received substantial critical attention, much of it focusing on the postmodern qualities of such works as The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and Hello America. Indeed, the starting point for much of the criticism is summarized in Jeremy Lewis's observation that “Ballard's fiction stands at the forefront of postmodern aesthetics” (27), which implies a sharp distinction between Ballard's aesthetics and those of his high modernist predecessors. Ballard's professed disdain for “the alienated and introverted fantasies of James Joyce, Eliot and the writers of the so-called Modernist Movement” might also suggest that...