Expatriate Writing

This volume presents the work of internationally renowned scholars from Australia, Germany, Italy, South Africa, the UK and the US. The focus on W.G. Sebald¿s writing as that of an expatriate author offers a fresh and productive approach to Sebald scholarship. In one way or another, all 28 essays in this innovative, bi-lingual collection take up the notion of Sebald¿s experience as an expatriate writer: be it in the analysis of intertextual, transmedial and generic border crossings, on the ¿exposure to the other¿ and the experience of alterity, on the question of identity construction and performance, on affinities with other expatriate writers, on the recurring topics of ¿home¿, ¿exile¿, ¿dislocation¿ and ¿migration¿, or on the continuing work of ¿memory¿ to work through and to preserve the consciousness of a destructive past that has informed the childhood as much as the adult life-world of the author. Gerhard Fischer is Head of German Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His research interests and publications are in modern theatre and drama, World War I, and migration history and multiculturalism. As convenor of the Sydney German Studies Symposia, he has edited a number of volumes on modern German literature, including Heiner Müller: ConTEXTS and HISTORY (Tübingen 1995), Debating Enzensberger: Great Migration and Civil War (Tübingen 1996), and, with David Roberts, Schreiben nach der Wende: Ein Jahrzehnt deutscher Literatur, 1989¿1999 (2nd.ed. Tübingen 2008). The latest volume in the series is The Play within the Play (with Bernhard Greiner, Amsterdam/New York, NY 2007).