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 chapter seeks to problematize what it means to ‘map’ literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the example of Romantic poet John Clare. The first half of the chapter rereads Clare through one critical and two creative interpretations of his sense of place and space, by John Barrell, Franco Moretti, and Iain Sinclair. Reading Clare in, and through, others generates a multilayered response that highlights the range of spatial forms of interpretation embraced by literary studies whilst also critically interpreting both maps and texts used in those arguments. The second half of the chapter offers a fresh reading-as-mapping of Clare by prioritizing time over space, drawing upon a concept articulated by French historian Pierre Nora, that of lieux de mémoire (sites/realms of memory). Nora’s model of the loss of shared, lived history and its memorialization in fixed sites is applied to Clare to enable a move from a focus on the predominantly spatial to the spatio-temporal. Does the concept of lieux de mémoire only work at a macro level, or can be localized in an individual? This section seeks to come at place through the memory that it embodies.

This chapter argues that a logic of fiduciary exchangeability finds its most sustained and versatile expressions in the work of the celebrated London writer Iain Sinclair. Sinclair’s work of the 1990s is both a crucial signal of a deepening intimacy between experimental and genre writing that has become all the more pronounced over the past two decades, and a leading-edge example of the techniques of market metafiction so prevalent today. The chapter reads Sinclair’s novel Downriver (1991), published in the wake of the Thatcherite transformation of the City of London’s financial services sector, as exploring what happens to structures of fiduciary circulation when they are pushed to – and beyond – their limits. The reading of the ostensibly non-fictional Lights Out for the Territory (1997) as an exercise in the “hermeneutics of speculation,” meanwhile, argues for the constitutive roles of faith and belief even in texts that apparently ground themselves in the real and material, in the process challenging the homology between literary realism and precious metal that is a basic premise of much key work in the New Economic Criticism.

This chapter argues that we might better understand postmodernism’s ambivalent appropriation of genre models by theorizing it in terms of a logic of quasi- or “as if” belief that cuts across structures of financial and literary market exchange. Taking recent work in economic sociology and the “New Economic Criticism,” as jumping-off points it shows how a deep-rooted kinship between fiction and finance as forms of writing that mediate value in the modern credit economy (in Mary Poovey’s terms) are becoming newly visible today. The shared condition of fictional texts’ and financial and monetary instruments’ successful market circulation is their solicitation of tacit faith or trust in imaginary things. A desire both to exploit and to subvert this condition of “fiduciary exchangeability” shapes the experiments in supernatural narrative form offered by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Lunar Park (2005), Anne Billson’s Suckers (1993), Stephen Marche’s The Hunger of the Wolf (2015), and Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010). In the work of these writers we see many of the crucial elements of market metafiction in action.