W. G. Sebald, the Uncanny and Nostalgia: Combined Influences on Creative Writing

W. G. Sebald’s Use of the Uncanny and Nostalgia investigates the importance of two powerful affects in the four prose fictions of the German writer W. G. Sebald. It concludes that Sebald generated the uncanny and nostalgia by using ambiguity, coincidence and repetition, in the case of the uncanny, and exaggeration and the homesick-sick-of-home paradox in the case of nostalgia. Research revealed that the uncanny and nostalgia were prevalent and crucial to Sebald’s creating the despairing and elegiac moods for which his texts are famous. It also exposed common characteristics of the uncanny and nostalgia.