W. G. Sebald and the Global Valences of the Critical

Since his death nearly two decades ago, W. G. Sebald’s literary star among academics and critics has risen to astounding heights. Sebald’s transformation from controversial yet obscure Germanist to seemingly permanent fixture of scholarly monographs, articles, reviews, syllabi, and conference proceedings furnishes us with an instructive glimpse behind the velvet rope of global literary eminence. His meteoric rise shines a light on the hegemonic role the Anglophone literary market plays in the processes that authors and their texts undergo when they migrate from a national literary market to a planetary readership.

Contributors: Stuart Burrows, Nissim Calderon, Yahya Elsaghe, Rodrigo Fresán, Maria Malikova, Isa Murdock-Hinrichs, He Ning, Sina Rahmani, Uwe Schütte