This essay provides an associatively structured overview of the wide field of painting and ekphrasis in Sebald’s work. Starting with Sebald’s collaborations with his friend and artist Jan Peter Tripp, the essay moves to his use of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) in The Rings of Saturn. Then the essay then explores the role of battle paintings in Sebald’s writings, especially their use to discuss issues of representation of historical events. In the next step, figurations of melancholy in Sebald are discussed on the basis of Dürer’s engraving Melencolia along with the theme of pulverization relating to the painter Ferber in The Emigrants. The conclusion compares Sebald’s poetics to the epistemology of knowledge inaugurated by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

Lisa Robertson’s feminist poetics engage with the histories of sexualised domination, and indulge erotic pleasures while committing to ‘return to the sex of my thinking’. Robertson’s poetry seeks to free feminised subjects from the constraints of poetic patriarchy, embodied by Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch and Rousseau. Conflating Lucretius with the Story of O, she proposes a theory of reading as sensual pleasure and domination. But she explicitly rejects the imperial militancy of the Ovidian tradition, and inverts the gendered relations of domination and subjection associated with Petrarchanism in her book The Men. Her poems show how a feminised subject might resist the logic of domination and bondage that inheres in much classical erotic poetry through a ‘soft architecture’ – a term she borrows from Gottfried Semper. Robertson’s aesthetics of precarity (the shack, the blackberry) incorporates feminised embodiment into the patriarchal city (Rome) or the settler one (Vancouver). Through her art-historical and architectural interests in the fold, fashion and textiles, Robertson seeks to translate bondage into ornament, and release the lyric from the constraint of a singular ‘I’ into a more collective and transient impersonality.

The introduction makes the case for fictional biography (or ‘biofiction’) as fundamental to understanding the reception of Roman poetry. Bringing together developments in life-writing studies and recent work on ancient biography and poets’ Lives, it develops a concept of biofictional reading as a key mode of the reception of Latin poetry. Aware of ancient habits of reading poetry ‘for the life’, Roman poets wrote autofictional versions of their Lives for later readers to pick up, creating a body of literature that demands to be read in terms of Lives in reception.