This book offers a new critical perspective on the perpetual problem of literature's
relationship to reality and in particular on the sustained tension between literature and
historiography. The scholarly and literary works of W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) serve as striking
examples for this discussion for the way in which they demonstrate the emergence of a new
hybrid discourse of literature as historiography. This book critically reconsiders the claims
and aims of historiography by re-evaluating core questions of the literary discourse and by
assessing the ethical imperative of literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Guided by an
inherently interdisciplinary framework this book elucidates the interplay of epistemological
aesthetic and ethical concerns that define Sebald's criticism and fiction. Appropriate to the
way in which Sebald's works challenge us to rethink the boundaries between discourses genres
disciplines and media this work proceeds in a methodologically non-dogmatic way drawing on
hermeneutics semiotics narratology and discourse theory. In addition to contextualizing
Sebald within postwar literature in German the book is the first English-language study to
consider Sebald's oeuvre as a whole. Of interest for Sebald experts and enthusiasts literary
scholars and historians concerned with the problematic of representing the past.
