SEBALD, W.G. [trans. Michael Hamburger] After Nature London, Penguin Books, 2001
8vo. Original cloth bound brown boards with gilt lettering on spine; Original illustrated dust wrapper with photograph of trees submerged in water; pp. [10] 5-112 [10]; minimal white stain to back board and very slight bruising to rear of spine; near fine copy.
First Edition
Beginning with Canto II of Dante's Inferno, "I entered on the steep wild-wooded way", After Nature is Sebald's first literary work and an extended prose poem that was written in Germany in 1988. It concerns the life of three men all unified in their quest to understand the position of humankind in the world. There is the German Renaissance painter Matthais Grunewald, the Englightenment botanist-explorer George Stellar and the author himself, who describes his journeying through a natural landscape ravaged by the neglect of previous centuries.
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