W G Sebald In Context

The German academic and writer W. G. Sebald made an astounding ascent into the canon of world literature. In this volume, leading experts from both the English- and the German-speaking worlds explore his celebrated prose works published in the short span from 1996 to his premature death in 2001. Special attention is paid to Sebald's unpublished texts and books awaiting translation into English. The volume – illustrated with many unpublished archive images – scrutinizes the dual nature of Sebald's life and work, located between Germany and England, academic and literary writing, vilification and idolization. Through nearly forty essays on a broad range of topics, W. G. Sebald in Context achieves a revision of our understanding of Sebald, defying many clichés about him. Particular attention is paid to the manifold ways in which Sebald's writings exerted a legacy far beyond literature, especially in the areas of art, cinema, and popular music.

Departing from the recent critical literature on the emergence of a new German Jewry, this volume proposes a new perspective on the post-1980s phenomenon of re-emerging Jewish culture in Germany as a case study for wider developments in Europe and the international context.

This book offers a new critical perspective on the perpetual problem of literature's relationship to reality and in particular on the sustained tension between literature and historiography. The scholarly and literary works of W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) serve as striking examples for this discussion, for the way in which they demonstrate the emergence of a new hybrid discourse of literature as historiography. This book critically reconsiders the claims and aims of historiography by re-evaluating core questions of the literary discourse and by assessing the ethical imperative of literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Guided by an inherently interdisciplinary framework, this book elucidates the interplay of epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical concerns that define Sebald's criticism and fiction. Appropriate to the way in which Sebald's works challenge us to rethink the boundaries between discourses, genres, disciplines, and media, this work proceeds in a methodologically non-dogmatic way, drawing on hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory. In addition to contextualizing Sebald within postwar literature in German, the book is the first English-language study to consider Sebald's œuvre as a whole. Of interest for Sebald experts and enthusiasts, literary scholars and historians concerned with the problematic of representing the past.

This volume presents the work of internationally renowned scholars from Australia, Germany, Italy, South Africa, the UK and the US. The focus on W.G. Sebald’s writing as that of an expatriate author offers a fresh and productive approach to Sebald scholarship. In one way or another, all 28 essays in this innovative, bi-lingual collection take up the notion of Sebald’s experience as an expatriate writer: be it in the analysis of intertextual, transmedial and generic border crossings, on the “exposure to the other” and the experience of alterity, on the question of identity construction and performance, on affinities with other expatriate writers, on the recurring topics of “home”, “exile”, “dislocation” and “migration”, or on the continuing work of “memory” to work through and to preserve the consciousness of a destructive past that has informed the childhood as much as the adult life-world of the author.

Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.

Uses the problem of modernity to explore various themes in Sebald's work.

Summary: "W.G. Sebald, frequently mentioned in the same breath as Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov, is one of the most important European writers of recent decades. He has been lauded by such major cultural commentators as Susan Sontag and Paul Auster, and he has combined wide public appeal with universal critical acclaim. His work is concerned with questions of memory, exile, representation, and, above all else, history. But his approach to history is strikingly different from conventional historiographical writing on the one hand, and from the historical novel on the other. His texts are hybrid in nature, mixing fiction, biography, historiography, travel-writing and memoir, and incorporating numerous photographic images. This volume seeks to respond to the complexities of Sebaldʼs image of history by presenting essays by a team of international scholars, all of whom are acknowledged Sebald experts. It offers a unique and exciting perspective on the dazzling work of one of the major literary figures of our times."--Publisher description.

Collection of texts published previously.