This essay provides an overview of Sebald’s work in relation to the literary topos of ‘travel writing’. Considering his work from Nach der Natur to the Korsika Project, it illuminates some of the sources on which he drew (including Thomas More and Thomas Mann), the contexts within which he worked, and the contribution of his work itself to contemporary modes of travel writing. The essay marks out the key waypoints in the history of the form, including its implication in the history of imperial expansion as well as its connection with the ‘grand tour’, while also sketching out some more recent interpretations as they have been conceived by writers like Bruce Chatwin. Within Sebald’s work, it suggests that the idea of the contemporary travel writer as an ‘outmoded’ figure is key to an ‘atmospherics of lateness’, and even that the coinage ‘Sebaldian’ inheres in a distinctive interweaving of the creative and the critical staged within the context of travel. Lastly, the essay outlines some specific issues relating to Sebald’s presence in Britain, taking into consideration the particularities of East Anglia as well as his reception by contemporary British ‘psychogeographers’.

Elizabeth Bishop loved Florida, the “state with the prettiest name.” She settled for a time in Key West, on the southernmost archipelago of the continental United States, delighting in the vivid birds and bright fishes of its tropical environment. The shifting seascape of coral islands and submerged reefs resonated with Bishop’s deep sense of contingency and flux. The Keys is a place of hybridity; of silt, shadows, and salvage. Its soft and balmy climate belies a complex and traumatic history of colonial struggle, racial violence, and loss. This chapter explores Bishop’s affective response to and relationship with place through the complex interwoven histories of racial and cultural identity of Southern Florida. It argues that the ‘Bone Key’ became a proving ground for much of the poetry that made up Bishop’s first collection, North & South (1946), shaping and animating the imagined South that forms one of the volume’s poles.

The repeated patterns of metropolitan urban activities that act as palimpsest in Chaucer’s fiction also impose themselves on our understanding of his place and achievement in late medieval and early modern London book history. The London Chaucer legacy takes on many different, often quasi-autobiographical, forms in the two hundred years following his death. Sensitivity to the dynamics of reader response inherent in his fiction among near contemporary and later writers ensured Chaucer’s works remained an important part of a vibrant metropolitan English literary culture. The making and celebration of an English past that glorified London remained a high priority within that culture among the book producers, copyists and printers who also serve as the first chroniclers of London’s Chaucer.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.