| Chapter 1: | Postimperial Rural Histories and “Ironic Nostalgia” in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn |
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Chapter 1
Postimperial Rural Histories and “Ironic Nostalgia” in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn
Lucienne Loh
In the opening of The Rings of Saturn, the German writer W. G. Sebald reveals that in 1992 he set off on an extended walk across the Suffolk countryside in order to recover from a period of fatigue. In 1995 this walk became the inspiration for Die Ringe des Saturn—a beguiling mosaic of fiction, history, travelogue, biography, autobiography, myth, and memoir—incorporating tenuous histories which connect rural Suffolk to places as far afield as the Congo, China, and Indonesia. An English version of the text, The Rings of Saturn, followed in 1998 and met