J. J. Long – författare

Likened to Proust, Gunter 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. Sebald's refracted and sometimes alienated views of both his native Germany and his adopted English homeland have had astonishing resonance in the German- and English-speaking worlds. 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 very heart of contemporary culture: memory, exile, identity, representation, history, the Holocaust. 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.

Likened to Proust, Gunter 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. Sebald's refracted and sometimes alienated views of both his native Germany and his adopted English homeland have had astonishing resonance in the German- and English-speaking worlds. 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 very heart of contemporary culture: memory, exile, identity, representation, history, the Holocaust. 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.

W. G. Sebald is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant writers to have emerged onto the global literary scene in recent decades, and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Nabokov, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Proust, and Primo Levi.W. G. Sebald - Image, Archive, Modernity offers a unique and original reading of Sebald's dazzling oeuvre, arguing that his work is concerned first and foremost with the problem of modernity. It focuses in particular on the numerous archival institutions and processes that lie at the very heart of modernity and are repeatedly thematised throughout Sebald’s work. Adopting a broad definition of the archive to encompass a wide range of material practices, the book analyses the function of photography, museums, libraries, and other systems of knowledge to which Sebald’s texts obsessively return. Following Foucault, such systems are seen as central to the exercise of power and the constitution of subjectivity in modernity. By undertaking a differentiated analysis that is attuned to the formal complexities of Sebald’s texts, this book shows that Sebald’s engagement with structures of power-knowledge is characterised by a melancholy struggle to assert autonomous selfhood in the face of the institutional and discursive determinants of subjectivity.Features* Original interdisciplinary approach* Written by an acknowledged Sebald specialist* Focus on modernity which expands the parameters of our understanding of Sebald* Fully up-to-date, taking account of all of the most recent research