ABSTRACT
As a literary scholar, W. G. Sebald was primarily interested in literature from the fringes of German-speaking Europe and the remoter edges of the established canon, though as a professor of German literature he was, of course, thoroughly conversant with the canonical German writers. Nonetheless, the names of such writers from the German Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle classes) as Lessing, Goethe, and Thomas Mann are conspicuously absent from the bibliographies of his critical writings. By contrast, there is a striking preponderance of Austrian and Alemannic names over German ones, for while Sebald published only about ten essays on German writers, he wrote almost thirty articles on Austrian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, nineteen essays on Austrian writers and topoi connected with Austrian literature are collected in the two volumes of essays Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (The Description of Misfortune) (1985) and Unheimliche Heimat (Strange Homeland) (1991), which made his name as an Austrianist in both Germany and Austria. It is true that among the Austrian writers discussed by Sebald one can find more than a few who in the meantime have found their way into the canon and occupy places next to established authors like Adalbert Stifter, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Franz Kafka: one thinks of contemporary writers like Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Gerhard Roth. However, one looks in vain in his critical work for the likes of Franz Grillparzer, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer, finding in their place Charles Sealsfield, Peter Altenberg, and Jean Améry.
