This chapter explores metamorphosis by focusing on the so-called ‘shearwaters of Diomedea’ – a group of seabirds whose odd behaviour recalls their previous existence as humans. It puts these birds in conversation with other humans-turned-animals both ancient and modern and investigates how they reflect on the experience of transformation. The chapter reveals that both ancient and modern tales of metamorphosis draw on the notion of hybridity in so far as many of the creatures undergoing such a transformation are, in effect, hybrids: they retain part of their human identity while also sporting the body of an animal. At the same time the chapter points to an important difference between ancient and modern ways of thinking the human. It shows that modern tales of metamorphosis tend to explore the dissolution of the boundary that separates the human from all other animals. The ancient conversation, by contrast, returns to – and ultimately affirms – the positions of some of the Greek philosophers arguing for an essential human difference.

The second chapter touches more firmly on the philosophical debate and the arguments for human exceptionalism put forward over its course. The chapter puts Xanthus (the prophetic horse from Homer’s Iliad) as the first and prototypical speaking animal in the Western tradition in conversation with other famous speaking animals, including Plutarch’s speaking pig Grunter (Gryllus), a speaking rooster who claims to be a re-incarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras, and Kafka’s Red Peter. The chapter shows that the figure of the speaking animal is central to Western conceptions of the human. In classical antiquity, it features in stories that confirm the vertical relationship between humans (at the top) and animals (below). And yet, at the same time, right from the start of the conversation in the ancient world, the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism. There is a direct line between how some modern animal fables point to man’s animal nature and the concept of the human explored in parts of the ancient evidence.

This essay considers the question of Sebald and cinema both in terms of how his texts engage with the medium and how film, in its turn, has treated the author and his works. The argument takes its cue from the essay ‘Kafka im Kino’ (translated as ‘Kafka Goes to the Movies’) in order to discuss the imprint of filmgoing experience that Sebald takes from Kafka, in dialogue with his own. The experience of film viewing raises issues that are central to Sebald’s writing, turning on the potential for identification and community of experience, the reliability of visual evidence and the vicissitudes of memory. These run through the references to film – ranging from early narrative cinema to different modes of documentary film and the French and German new waves – across a set of works by Sebald. The references, extending to medial avatars and intermedial relations, form a ramified network of association, not least in relation to projection and doubling. And the same preoccupations are also seen to reverberate through the cinematic afterlives of Sebald: films in different fictional, documentary and essayistic forms that have drawn – and continue to draw – their inspiration from his writing, also in its intermeshing with his biography.

Sebald virtually identified with Kafka. He published two substantial essays on The Castle, inspired by Walter Benjamin. Foregrounding the theme of death, he draws on Freud’s ambivalent concept of the death-drive, and associates Kafka also with Schubert’s Winterreise. Drawing implicitly on Canetti’s Crowds and Power, he interprets the protagonist of The Castle as a messianic figure seeking to confront the Castle’s power. Another essay uses Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, with its Darwinian implications, as pretext for a meditation on cultural and evolutionary decline. In Sebald’s fictional works, Kafka is present throughout much of Vertigo, which in part follows Kafka’s own journey through Northern Italy from Venice to Lake Garda and alludes to Kafka’s ‘The Huntsman Gracchus’, set in the lakeside town of Riva. Sebald explores Kafka’s state of mind, as attested in letters and diaries, returning to the theme of death and also hinting at Kafka’s possible homosexuality. In Austerlitz, a significant quotation from The Trial is worked into the text. Altogether, much of Sebald’s work represents a homage to Kafka.

5. This chapter focuses on Foes ending, a book designed to confront with the limits of the novel form. It explores in new detail the evolution of this work from Coetzees drafts.

The surrealist imagination is an imagination at war. Born out of the horrors of the European trenches and catapulted into the nightmares of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust, surrealism has always responded to the historical violence that has shaped and energized it. At the same time, however, surrealist responses to war are all too aware of their struggle to articulate their political nature. How can surrealism write war? What is the political import of surrealism’s indirect aesthetics? How might surrealist writing advance our understanding of the complexities of wartime subjectivity? This chapter explores these questions by turning its attention to two dark allegorical novels: Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939) and Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941). To date, discussions of British surrealist writing have confined themselves to the aesthetic and political contexts of interwar and wartime poetry. But there is a need to complicate this literary history if we are to better understand the diversity of British surrealist writing before, during, and after the Second World War. Whilst the novel was very much a marginal practice in 1930s and 1940s surrealist circles, it nevertheless emerged in the wartime period as a dark form of literary political enquiry; one that, coming through from the counter-Enlightenment impulses of the Gothic, poses disquieting questions about wartime human appetites for violence, corruption, and absolute power.

This chapter discusses a grammar of realism that calls upon a variety of prose effects, including the management of time effects and the presence of abundant or telling detail, to show what is at stake in realist writing and how much happens in the prose despite its alleged retreat from artifice. Although realism has found itself assailed periodically, often for its artifice, this chapter testifies to the enduring value of realist prose while offering insights into its evolution.

Kafka and Mann’s challenge to the concepts of reason and cause.

This chapter explores the presence of religious narratives and traditions in Modernist literature, arguing that it shapes both what authors write about and how they write. Drawing on texts by Trakl, Rilke, Brecht, Musil, Thomas Mann, Wolfenstein, Kafka and Sachs, the chapter explores the wide range of attitudes both towards established religion (Christianity and Judaism) and alternative forms of spirituality (occultism and spiritualism). For all their differences, Modernist authors focus on a set of recurring concerns: the tension between tradition and modernity; the relationship between self and God, and between self and other; the changing role of community; and existential experiences such as suffering, persecution and death. In times of war, social change and political upheaval, the relationship between literature and religion remains mutually productive. Modernist texts reflect the crisis of established religious traditions, but literature is also an active agent, a site where old and new attitudes towards spiritual matters can be explored.