Manchester University Press has just published a new collection co-edited by Ben Hutchinson, Professor of European Literature in the Department of German, entitled A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W.G. Sebald.
W.G. Sebald was a German writer and academic, whose work was largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss, and loss of civilisations. This new collection investigates the crucial question of ‘restitution’ in his work, with the essays placing Sebald’s oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics.
While 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.
For more details of the collection, please see the publisher’s page here:
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719088520