1986 marked a fresh departure in W.G. Sebald’s literary œuvre. Having written poetry for decades and, for a short time, worked on experimental scripts, Sebald reinvented himself as a prose writer and concentrated on fashioning an innovative form of highly stylized, illustrated docufiction. From approximately July 1986 to early 1988, he worked on a first collection of literary prose that had no official working title and was usually referred to simply as the Prose Project. An unsuccessful funding application provides a detailed insight into what the overall project was supposed to look like, but while Sebald worked on it, the project underwent adaptations and was never published in the originally envisaged form. This essay considers archival material relating to the Prose Project, which reveals the common origins of Vertigo and The Emigrants, and assesses the development of Sebald’s ground-breaking intermedial process and the poetological implications of his turn towards narrative prose.

Sebald’s literary life began in Manchester. The short period he spent there (1966-70) left a lasting imprint on his writing, which this essay will explore through the three texts most directly inspired by the city: his 1967 poem ‘Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical’, the long prose poem Nach der Natur, and the fourth section of The Emigrants (‘Max Ferber’). These works reveal the aspects of Manchester most significant to Sebald: his encounters with an ‘industrial wasteland’, the Mancunian Jewish community, and Michel Butor’s 1956 novel, set in a fictionalized version of Manchester, L’Emploi du temps.