Kafka

A Very Short Introduction
Erscheinungsjahr 2005
ISBN: 978-0-19-280455-6
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 160 Seiten, Format (B × H): 112 mm x 174 mm, Gewicht: 132 g

Reihe: Very Short Introductions

'When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.' So begins Franz Kafka's most famous story Metamorphosis.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is among the most intriguing and influential writers of the twentieth century. During his lifetime he worked as a civil servant and published only a handful of short stories, the best known being The Transformation. All three of his novels, The Trial, The Castle, and The Man Who Disappeared [America], were published after his death and helped to found Kafka's reputation as a uniquely perceptive interpreter of the twentieth
century.

Kafka's fiction vividly evokes bizarre situations: a commercial traveller is turned into an insect, a banker is arrested by a mysterious court, a fasting artist starves to death in the name of art, a singing mouse becomes the heroine of her nation. Attending both to Kafka's crisis-ridden life and to the subtleties of his art, Ritchie Robertson shows how his work explores such characteristically modern themes as the place of the body in culture, the power of institutions over people, and the
possibility of religion after Nietzsche had proclaimed 'the death of God'. The result is an up-to-date and accessible portrait of a fascinating author which shows us ways to read and make sense of his perplexing and absorbing work.

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Zielgruppe

General readers, those studying Kafka, German literature, and philosophy at secondary school and on undergraduate courses.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Robertson, Ritchie

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur

Über Autor(innen)

Ritchie Robertson is a Professor of German at Oxford University and a Fellow of St John's College. He has published books on Kafka, Heine, and Thomas Mann, as well as The Jewish Question in German Literature (OUP, 1999). He has translated several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German authors into English for the Oxford World Classics and Penguin Classics series