"W. G. Sebald was born in 1944 in a remote village in southern Germany. He found his way as a young academic to England and a career as a lecturer in German, then as Professor of German, and ultimately as Professor of European Literature. Only between the late 1980s and his untimely death in 2001 did he concentrate on nonacademic writing, fashioning a new kind of prose work that shares features with but remains distinct from the novel, essay, travel writing, and memoir forms." "Deane Blackler briefly explores Sebald's biography before taking up an analysis of the reading practice Sebald's texts call forth: that of a "disobedient reader," a proactive reader challenged to question the text by Sebald's peculiar use of poetic language, the pseudoautobiographical voice of his narrators, the seemingly documentary photographs he inserted into the books, and by his representations of place. Blackler reads Sebald's prose fiction as adventurous and disobedient in its formulation, as a revitalizing of literary fiction for the third millennium."--BOOK JACKET.

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