This essay provides an overview of Sebald’s work in relation to the literary topos of ‘travel writing’. Considering his work from Nach der Natur to the Korsika Project, it illuminates some of the sources on which he drew (including Thomas More and Thomas Mann), the contexts within which he worked, and the contribution of his work itself to contemporary modes of travel writing. The essay marks out the key waypoints in the history of the form, including its implication in the history of imperial expansion as well as its connection with the ‘grand tour’, while also sketching out some more recent interpretations as they have been conceived by writers like Bruce Chatwin. Within Sebald’s work, it suggests that the idea of the contemporary travel writer as an ‘outmoded’ figure is key to an ‘atmospherics of lateness’, and even that the coinage ‘Sebaldian’ inheres in a distinctive interweaving of the creative and the critical staged within the context of travel. Lastly, the essay outlines some specific issues relating to Sebald’s presence in Britain, taking into consideration the particularities of East Anglia as well as his reception by contemporary British ‘psychogeographers’.

The writings of W. G. Sebald have inspired visual artists, who have found kinship with him through a wide variety of shared common themes. Sebald himself undoubtedly emboldened such a vibrant response from visual artists, first by imaginatively using photographs and other images as an integral part of his own books and then by collaborating with living artists in the making of two books of his poetry late in his life. Visual artists could relate to the places that he wrote about, especially the landscape and ecology of adopted home of East Anglia. Other themes that artists frequently felt they had in common with Sebald included exile, memory, trauma, the archive, history, war, colonialism. As more and more artists came to use Sebald’s writings as a jumping off point for their own work, curators began to respond by organizing major exhibitions of such work for important museums in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

This essay discusses the role of East Anglia in the biography and literary works of Sebald. Sebald lived from 1970 until his premature death in 2001 in the eastern part of England, whose charm as a remote stretch of land has left its mark in his writings in many ways. As early as 1974, Sebald published a travelogue in the travel section of the newspaper Die Zeit, describing ‘A Leisurely Tour through Norfolk and Suffolk’. This journalistic piece anticipated the portrayal of East Anglia in his later narrative texts. Similarly, East Anglia repeatedly became a theme in Sebald’s poetry with motifs returning in the later prose. The essay focuses on After Nature and The Rings of Saturn, but also includes Austerlitz and the Corsica Project. To conclude, it examines the extent to which Sebald’s account can be understood as a faithful description of East Anglia, or rather, as the essay argues, as a poetic portrait of the area that constituted Sebald’s second “Heimat”.

Responses supplied by contributors from East Anglia recorded by BBC Radio Norfolk, BBC Radio Suffolk, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and BBC Essex

Responses supplied by contributors from East Anglia recorded by BBC Radio Norfolk, BBC Radio Suffolk, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and BBC Essex

What underlies the English rural idyll? This chapter explores the relationship between stratigraphy, economy, and sense of place, taking as its primary focus the chalk hills of South Cambridgeshire, the ‘great croprolite boom’, and the significance of cement production. Yet in exploring the way in which social and economic change delves into geological history, it challenges chronotopes that emphasise continuity and consonance within the landscape, focussing our attention instead on temporal disjuncture, displacement, and a geology in motion.