Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle

Kafka has long been read as the chronicler of modern despair, of human suffering in an unidentifiable, timeless landscape. This new collection of critical essays–few of which have ever been published in America previously, and which represent the best of contemporary Kafka scholarship–shows us instead Kafka as a representative of his era, his "existential anguish" springing from the very real historical conflicts that agitated Prague–and the world–at the turn of the century. Discussing Kafka in relation to anti-Semitism, Zionism, psychoanalysis, contemporary theories of sexuality, and the First World War, these essays also reveal his engagement with the leading cultural and intellectual figures of the fin de siècle, among them Freud, Nietzsche, Buber, and Sacher-Masoch. For the first time, Kafka's writings and the text of his own life emerge as fascinating documents of fin-de-siècle culture in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and as testimony to an extraordinary artist's personal struggle with the politics and prejudices of his time.