ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a traveller's account of a landscape. When he visited the Lake District in 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: On the rudest surface of the English earth, there is seen the effect of centuries of civilization, so that one do not quite get at naked Nature anywhere. This passage formulates key issues for consideration in a reading of W. G. Sebald's writing on landscape. The comment that Hawthorne makes also resonates in Sebald's landscape writing. Amongst these texts, The Rings of Saturn is taken in the chapter as a platform from which to offer a critique of current understandings of landscape from a perspective that looks to assimilate the findings of cultural geography and lite ran criticism. This text is selected for extended analysis here as it speaks to these theoretical concerns most readily and comes closer than Sebald's other major texts Vertigo, The Emigrants, Auslerlitz - to describing a specific landscape.
