The Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara is a short story, about 70 pages, By Anna Seghers. In this blog I will be exploring the themes, motifs, structure, style, narrative and characters within the Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara. I also hope to discuss aspects of Seghers’ life and work where they have some bearing on the analysis of this particular story.
My motivation for doing so is both selfish and altruistic. I recently began studying this story as part of an undergraduate course in European Modernist Fiction and found that the story itself is out of print, so I was forced to read it from a very poor copy. I decided to produce a typed copy for my own use and then thought it would probably help other students to enjoy the story for themselves.
Secondly, I discovered that, with one or two excellent exceptions, this wonderful story has had little critical attention in English and almost nothing electronic, and because I am unable to read German and obsessed with electronic media I thought I would try to remedy the situation.
At the moment I have a PDF copy of the story on my hard drive and I am hoping that I will be able to make that available, unfortunately I haven’t been able to ascertain whether a copyright exists for the English translation my copy is taken from and I would like to be sure I’m not breaking the law before I make the file available online.
However, over the next few weeks I will be publishing analysis and excerpts of the text for academic purposes, which will not breech copyright, and I will continue to try to discover the situation regarding copyright.