Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Kafka’s writing and our reading
- 2 A psychoanalytic reading of The Man who Disappeared
- 3 The exploration of the modern city in The Trial
- 4 The Castle
- 5 Kafka’s short fiction
- 6 Kafka’s later stories and aphorisms
- 7 The letters and diaries
- 8 The case for a political reading
- 9 Kafka and Jewish folklore
- 10 Kafka and gender
- 11 Myths and realities in Kafka biography
- 12 Editions, translations, adaptations
- 13 Kafka adapted to film
- 14 Kafka and popular culture
- Index
- Series List
Introduction
Kafka’s Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Kafka’s writing and our reading
- 2 A psychoanalytic reading of The Man who Disappeared
- 3 The exploration of the modern city in The Trial
- 4 The Castle
- 5 Kafka’s short fiction
- 6 Kafka’s later stories and aphorisms
- 7 The letters and diaries
- 8 The case for a political reading
- 9 Kafka and Jewish folklore
- 10 Kafka and gender
- 11 Myths and realities in Kafka biography
- 12 Editions, translations, adaptations
- 13 Kafka adapted to film
- 14 Kafka and popular culture
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Jewish, German, Czech, born a subject of the Habsburgs at ‘the heart of Europe’ in Bohemian Prague in 1883, died a citizen of Czechoslovakia on the outskirts of Vienna forty-one years later; a speaker of French and Italian in addition to his native German, Czech, and Yiddish, which he learnt as an adult; steeped in both Jewish lore and German literature and surrounded by the sound of Czech for most of his life, Franz Kafka was first and foremost an internationalist and a European. Since his death he has been claimed as one of the foremost Jewish authors of his age, as the greatest modernist prose writer in the German language, and – at least after 1945 – as an icon of both German and Austrian literature. More recently, though with less enthusiasm, he has been hailed in his homeland as a Czech, where his memory helped inspire resistance to Soviet dominance in the 1960s. One thing is certain: in his affiliations and the resonance of his writings Kafka is the most cosmopolitan of all German-language writers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Kafka , pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
- 1
- Cited by