On (Not) Reading Wales in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001)

Abstract

This article explores representations of Wales in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001). It considers why the novel’s passages on Wales have often evaded scholarship on Sebald’s writing to date, and ways in which Austerlitz may seem eccentric to Welsh critical canons too. The article places Austerlitz in intertextual relationships with the literatures and cultural history of Wales and so uncovers some of the novel’s hidden Welsh references. In alluding to Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar for example, Austerlitz simultaneously turns away from Welsh history and reveals it in unexpected ways. The novel also calls to mind the nineteenth-century preacher John Elias in a way which offers an unusual perspective on Sebald’s poetics of coincidence. The article suggests alternative critical contexts in which Sebald’s Wales becomes productively legible; put most globally, it is interested in the practice and rewards of non-metropolitan reading, relationships between the supposed centres and margins of literature and the ways in which they remain in perpetual (re-)negotiation.