It seems fitting for a study in contemporary literary history to culminate in a reading of W. G. Sebald. The body of work he brought into expression from the late 1980s through to his death in a car accident in 2001, not far from his adopted home of some twenty years near Norwich, England, was itself a culmination, the harvest of a long personal apprenticeship: a German émigré, Sebald had been active as an academic in England since the 1960s, and was a professor of European literature at the University of East Anglia when his first major ‘non-academic’ work, the ‘elemental poem’ Nach der Natur, was published in 1988 (Michael Hamburger's translation, After Nature, was published in 2002). In literary and cultural terms, too, Sebald's work seems to respond, uniquely but representatively, to any number of preoccupations in late modernity. Born in 1944 in the village of Wertach im Allgäu in the German Alps, Sebald figured his own biography as indirectly but profoundly marked by the catastrophe of the Second World War: his work has frequently been read in terms of its tangential but pervasive response to traumatic history, and to the Holocaust in particular.