A literature of restitution: Critical essays on W. G. Sebald

Jeannette Baxter · Valerie Henitiuk · Ben Hutchinson

11.2015 г. · Manchester University Press

Всичко за тази електронна книга

This book investigates the crucial question of ‘restitution’ in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, with a foreword by his English translator Anthea Bell, the essays collected in this volume place Sebald’s oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics.

Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H. G. Adler, the volume notably returns to the original German texts. The recurring themes identified in the essays – from Sebald’s carefully calibrated syntax to his self-consciousness about ‘genre’, from his interest in liminal spaces to his literal and metaphorical preoccupation with blindness and vision – all suggest that the ‘attempt at restitution’ constitutes the very essence of Sebald’s understanding of literature.

За автора

Jeannette Baxter is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Valerie Henitiuk is Director of the Faculty Commons at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, where she also holds an academic appointment in English

Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent