This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then turns to two Prague-set novels, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, which explores the condition of stubborn aesthetic individualism under communism, and Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, set in the months following the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Beyond the Czech lands, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a significant work of avant-garde feminism, offers a doomed fantasy of post-war Austro-Hungarian relationships. Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, set in the Polish–Silesian borderlands, is a revenge thriller whose narrator is inspired by the radicalism of William Blake. These case studies signal the ways central Europe has been confabulated by British writers; they also show how an evolving canon of fiction-in-translation is appropriately pluralizing and updating the West’s idea of the ‘middle’.

“Performances” describes some of the most famous fasting practices, places and institutions that welcomed hunger artists, from sealed cages to open-air shows, from Succi’s impressive public fasting at the freak atmosphere of the Royal Aquarium London to his parade across Brooklyn bridge in New York in 1890. Based on Kafka’s Hungerkunstler, to reflect on the influence of the audience in the success or failure of fasting performances, the chapter describes a general typology of performances of public fasting and their implications in the epistemology of the art. It depicts hunger artists’ fencing, riding, climbing, ballooning, in specific urban contexts and their influence on contemporary knowledge on fasting, inanition and starvation. The chapter also analyses how the varied audiences appropriated hunger artists, and created a commotion, in which different and opposing interpretations of the facts coexisted in the public sphere, for example, concerning the risk of exceeding thirty days of fasting, and the ideal method to tackle fraud and provide ‘objectivity’. It also points out the controversial views on the scientific value of public fasting performances in medical journals and in the daily press.

The “Conclusion” presents the potential benefits of human fasting experiments and performances to ‘advance’ medical knowledge, as described by Dr Gunn, a member of the supervisory board of Dr Henry Tanner’s fast in New York in 1880, and one of his biographers. It is through the historical analysis of these ‘benefits’ that this final chapter discusses the actual epistemological value and historical agency of hunger artists, and summarizes the main analytical frameworks of the book. This final chapter also recapitulates the main landmarks of the rich ‘topography’ of the land of the hunger artists, from the long list of cities in which public fasts took place, to the variety of ‘citizens’ of the land who circulated across its vast territory and the places and material objects that brought doctors, fasters, impresarios, and global publics together. At the end of the conclusion, I have added a short discussion about the reasons for the hunger artists’ decline in the 1920s, in an endeavour to place Kafka’s pessimistic view of the metier in a proper context.

This chapter considers the formal and thematic legacy of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett on Kazuo Ishiguro’s late-modernist work. Situating Ishiguro’s lengthiest, most digressive, most formally challenging and funniest novel within the European modernist tradition, the chapter analyses its marked formal experimentation in the light of its idiosyncratic and often highly disturbing blend of humour and mishap, of comedy and adversity. The chapter proposes that The Unconsoled can be considered not only Ishiguro’s but also one of late-modernism’s great comic novels. As such, Ishiguro’s novel may be said successfully to resist the major consolation of meaning-making, parting company with narrative as a calmative and leaving behind the affirmations of consolation and solace.

In what would prove to be his last interview, Bolaño named for Monica Maristain the books that had marked his life. Alongside works in Spanish, English, French, and Latin, he also named Franz Kafka’s novels, the Aphorisms of Lichtenberg, and the Tractatus by Wittgenstein. This troika can be supplemented with Russian authors mentioned repeatedly in works and essays, for example Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. This chapter enumerates and analyzes Roberto Bolaño’s deep and persistent engagement with German and Russian literatures, and tries to make sense of a fundamental difference in the two repertoires: most of the Russian authors mentioned or alluded to in Bolaño’s work are recognized names in world literature read and appreciated by non-specialists, whereas his chosen German authors range from immortals such as J. W. von Goethe to long-forgotten names like Heinrich Lersch and Max Barthel. It is no surprise that these two literary traditions join in dialectical fashion in Bolaño’s magnum opus, 2666, where a German, Hans Reiter, derives literary inspiration from the diary of a Russian Jew, Boris Abramovich Ansky. The two literatures struggle with each other as do the two armies to cognitively map the evils of the 20th century.

Pairing David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo (1924) with Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1917), this chapter demonstrates how both writers troubled species boundaries by drawing on historical shifts in the public display of human and nonhuman beings. The first part explores how Garnett’s story of a man who volunteers to be caged between a chimpanzee and an orang-utan offers an ironic transformation structured around abrupt plot turns and taxonomic confusion. Here Garnett exposes hierarchies of both gender and species and offers glimpses of more ethical creaturely relations. The second half of the chapter brings Kafka’s story of an ape who learns to behave like a human into a critique of animal capture and zoological trade, in particular concerning Carl Hagenbeck’s business. Hagenbeck is subtly alluded to in Garnett’s novella, where the historical phenomenon of animal spectatorship informs his satirical depiction of London’s zoo, even as his treatment of race and human exhibition remains ambivalent. The section brings to light material from Hagenbeck’s own writings and newspaper coverage, alongside literary connections to Samuel Butler, John Collier and Louis MacNeice.

Without a Messiah expected, and if one’s current pain or trial is meaningless, why not commit suicide? In the Modernist canon, suicide is typically putting an end to one’s misery because there’s no reason not to do so, or because one is in any event a machine caused to do so by necessary causes and effects. Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus is an essay on how to live without hope or suicide; his novel The Plague starts with an averted suicide and ends with limited hope – or a hope for limits. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins and ends with the central duo’s wish, both times deferred, to hang themselves. Modernist responses to the question of meaning, and the attendant problem of suicide, include: persisting in hope or waiting despite the minimal probability of hope’s fulfillment (Franz Kafka, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Beckett); the epiphanies of the everyday, getting what it seemed you hoped for even without exactly having hoped for it (Virginia Woolf); affirmation of the repetitions, recurrences, and accidents of natural and human life, overcoming their sameness through an act of will (Camus).

This essay claims that “world literature” should be understood as a genre rather than as a canon of circulating texts. In this sense, “world literature” denotes writing that is written for and to the world in general, rather than for or to any particular community or readership. Franz Kafka’s writings exemplify this understanding of world literature, which was mediated by a particular moment in the history of philosophy—the moment when philosophy too became “worlded.” This essay considers three interconnected events of intellectual and literary history to advance this argument: 1) when the category “world literature” first appeared in England among a group of mid-eighteenth century Anglican clergymen called the Warburtonians; 2) Schopenhauer’s re-assemblage of Asian and European thought to produce a profoundly influential philosophy of the world; and 3) Kafka’s writings which belong to the Schopenhauerean aftermath, and which can be understood as a mode of literature which neither emerges from any particular literary/rhetorical lineage or tradition nor is directed towards or written in the interests of any knowable community or readership, but rather to and of the world itself.