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Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature by W.G. Sebald
Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature by W.G. Sebald
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‘We have become suspicious, rightly, of claims for literary greatness, but in Sebald’s case the claim was triumphantly justified. He was, he is, the real thing’ John Banville, Guardian
From acclaimed critic, novelist and academic W. G. Sebald, author of Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, a collection of essay on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him - appearing for the first time in English. As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighbouring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Germany, meant that concepts such as ‘home/land’, ‘borderland’ and ‘exile’ occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own. Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them.
This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude.
This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude.
Hardback
Publication: 23 Jan 2025, Hamish Hamilton
ISBN: 9780241144190
Extent: 240 pages
