Transgressive Iain Banks

Martyn Colebrook has published extensively on contemporary literature, including the work of J.G. Ballard, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, H.P. Lovecraft and China Mieville. He lives in Suffolk, United Kingdom. Katharine Cox is a Professor in English at Bournemouth University where she is head of the Department of Humanities and Law.

• Table of ContentsIntroduction (Martyn Colebrook, Katharine Cox and David Haddock)I. Scottish ContextThe Lessons of Lanark: Iain Banks, Alasdair Gray and the Scottish Political Novel (David Pattie)Lanark and The Bridge: Narrating Scotland as Post-Industrial Space (Martyn Colebrook)II. Geographies“I have never been to Nasqueron”: A Geographer Reads Banks (James Kneale)Landscape and the Imagination: Banks’ Representation of Argyll in The Crow Road (Tim Middleton)Imperfect Doubles: The Recasting of Place, Object and Character in the Dream Narratives of The Bridge (Bethan Jones)III. GenreTextual Crossings: Transgressive Devices in Banks’ Fiction (Katharine Cox)“Still magic in the world”: Banks and the Psychosomatic Supernatural (Kirsty A. Macdonald)Teaching Banks: The Wasp Factory and Frankenstein (Emily Garside and Katharine Cox)IV. Gender, Games and PlayContesting Gender in The Wasp Factory, Whit and The Business (Sarah Falcus)Games Playing Roles in Banks’ Fiction (Will Slocombe)Digital Souls and Virtual Afterlives in the Culture Series (Joseph Norman)“Hippies with mega nukes”: The Culture, Terror and the War Machine in Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games (William Stephenson)Afterword (Katharine Cox)BibliographyAbout the ContributorsIndex