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From: "Charlotte Maxwell" <[log in to unmask]>
W. G. Sebald - A Critical Companion
Edited by J. J. Long & Anne Whitehead
Published May 2004
Hardback £45.00 0 7486 1897 X
' W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion is an important collection of
essays that illuminates the crucial contributions of Sebald's work.
These astute and critically reflective essays, intelligently organized
and introduced, provide a wide-ranging consideration of the literary
innovation and intellectual complexity of Sebald's explorations of
history, culture and memory. The collection also highlights, through
highly sophisticated and subtle readings that bring together trauma
studies, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralist thought, the broad
significance of Sebald's provocative engagement with the traumatic
histories of WWII and its aftermath.’
Cathy Caruth
‘Sebald demonstrates that literature can be, literally, indispensable.
He was one by whom literature continues to live’
Susan Sontag
Likened to Proust, to Günter Grass and Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald
(1944-2001) is one of the most important writers of our time, combining
a wide readership with universal critical acclaim. In this first
collection to appear in English, newly commissioned essays by leading
international scholars offer interdisciplinary perspectives on Sebald’s
work, providing a thorough assessment of his achievement.
Sebald’s texts deal with issues that lie at the heart of contemporary
culture: memory, exile, identity, history, the Holocaust, and
representation. His texts are hybrid in nature, mixing fiction,
biography, historiography, travel-writing and memoir, and incorporating
numerous photographic images. In response to this, W. G. Sebald: A
Critical Companion focuses on the key areas of travel, intertextuality,
nature, and memory.
Introductory chapters situate Sebald’s work within the European
literary tradition and within contemporary critical discourse.
Individual chapters then draw on approaches from cultural and literary
studies, including ecocriticism, trauma theory and text-image studies,
in order to explore aspects of Sebald’s dazzling oeuvre. A
comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources rounds off
the volume, which will satisfy a growing need for a high-quality and up-
to-date guide to Sebald’s work for an English-speaking readership. The
interdisciplinary nature of the Companion means that it will appeal not
only to students and critics working on Sebald, but to anyone
interested in contemporary culture.
Key Features
* The first collection of essays on Sebald to appear in English
* Newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars
* Up to date and innovative readings of Sebald, covering all aspects of
his work
* Includes biographical chronology and comprehensive bibliography of
primary and secondary sources
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
A Note on References and Translations
W.G. Sebald Chronology
Part I: Contexts
1. J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, Introduction
2. George Szirtes, Meeting Austerlitz
3. Martin Swales, Theoretical Reflections on the Work of W.G. Sebald
Part II: Landscape and Nature
4.Greg Bond, On the Misery of Nature and the Nature of Misery
5. Colin Riordan, Ecocentrism in Sebald’s After Nature
6. Simon Ward, Ruins and Poetics in the Work of W.G. Sebald
Part III: Travel and Walking
7. John Beck, Reading Room: Erosion and Sedimentation in Sebald’s
Suffolk
8. Massimo Leone, Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W.G.
Sebald
9. John Zilcosky, Sebald’s Uncanny Travels, or the Impossibility of
Being Lost
Part IV: Intertextuality and Intermediality
10. Martin Klebes, Infinite Journey: From Kafka to Sebald
11. Russell Kilbourn, Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of
Memory in Austerlitz
12. Carolin Duttlinger, Traumatic Photographs: Remembrance and the
Technical Media in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
Part V: Haunting, Trauma, Memory
13. Wilfried Wilms, Taboo and Repression in On the Natural History of
Destruction
14. Jan Ceuppens, Seeing Things: Spectres and Angels in W.G. Sebald’s
Prose Fiction
15. Maya Barzilai, Facing the Past and the Female Spectre in The
Emigrants
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Charlotte Maxwell
Marketing Manager
Edinburgh University Press
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Tel: 0131 650 4223
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Website: www.eup.ed.ac.uk
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