Autobiography presently occupies a beleaguered place in education, not unlike teachers, whose lives have been diminished through the current emphasis on testing outcomes. This paper uses WG Sebald's writings as a place from which to relook at the relationship between writing and a life lived. Sebald was a German writer born in the shadow of WWII…

This chapter examines how the study of popular romantic fiction was used to transform students' understandings of the ways in which gendered identities are constructed and their perception of the way textual meanings are determined.