See Schuette’s note, and my response, in the Comments.) (Note, added 2019: since I wrote this, I’ve looked into the subject in more depth, and I agree with Uwe Schuette that Gilman’s idea is probably wrong. The Germanist Sander Gilman, a lifelong friend of Sebald’s (I believe they went to university in Freiburg together, although I haven’t been able to verify that), told me Sebald told him he got the idea of putting images in his novels from Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel . He himself has spoken of 19th century German forms of narrative as a precedent for his writing, if not his images. They include surrealism, but surrealist practices may not be his principal source. It seems to me that even the precedents for Sebald’s work are not yet clear. The history of postwar twentieth-century novels with photographs is far wider than Sebald’s oeuvre, and that wider history is in some danger of being occluded by the assumption that Sebald’s work can stand for the possibilities of postwar novels with included photographs. That investment in raising questions of veracity while exploring historical trauma makes Sebald’s novels markedly different from their surrealist predecessors, despite the fact that surrealist strategies are woven throughout his novels. His illustrated novels, poems, and essays are closer to nonfiction, and more experimental with regard to the boundaries of history, memoir, and fiction than some earlier novels with photographs.

Sebald’s popularity among academic critics may have distorted the wider history of novels with images, in that he has become the principal focus of scholarship even though his work is in some respects anomalous. Sebald’s place in the history of novels with images

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald