Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Clarendon Paperbacks) - Softcover

Anderson, Mark M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198159072 ISBN 13: 9780198159070

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1995

Synopsis

"One should either be a work of art, or wear one," proclaimed Oscar Wilde at the end of the nineteenth century; "I am made of literature, I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else," Franz Kafka declared a decade later. Between these two claims lies the largely unexplored region in which the European decadent movement turned into the modernist avant-garde. In this original historical study, Anderson explores Kafka's early dandyism, his interest in fashion, literary decadence and the "superficial" spectacle of modern urban life as well as his subsequent repudiation of these phenomena in forging a literary identity as the isolated, otherworldly "poet" of modern alienation. Rather than posit a break between these two personae, Anderson charts the historical continuities between the young Kafka and the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. The result is a startlingly unconventional portrait of Kafka and Prague at the turn of the century, involving such issues as Jungendstil aesthetics, Otto Weininger's "egoless" woman, the Viennese critique of architectural ornament, the clothing reform movement, anti-Semitism, and the question of Jewish-German writing.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Anderson is translator and editor of In the Storm of the Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann (Princeton UP, 1986), and editor of Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siecle, Schocken Books, NY, 1989.

Review:

"An innovative study of Kafka's search for literature, cogent and elegantly argued throughout."--Choice

"A fascinating and insightful reading of Kafka, which places the Czech writer's attitude to the body, and his engagement with theories of body culture, art and adornment of his period, at the centre of his work."--The Guardian

"Spritely, innovative, and provocative....It is a book about Kafka worth reading."--London Times Saturday Review

"By focusing on Kafka's clothes as image and reality, Mark Anderson succeeds in a wholly original manner in penetrating the mysterious ether that seems to understand Kafka's literary corpus as disembodied from his life and times. Anderson's work restores Kafka to fin-de-siecle Austrian, and especially Viennese, cultural and intellectual life. The author has reconnected Kafka with his work, arguing persuasively that in Kafka's case, life and art are reciprocal spheres that illuminate each other. The historian will be particularly interested in and grateful for Anderson's accomplishment....If clothes helped define Kafka the man, then Anderson's book will help redefine the man in conjunction with his literature."--Austrian History Yearbook

"It is Kafka's precarious position in this cultural environment that Mark Anderson reconstructs superbly in a well-researched and very readable study. The book is indispensable reading for Kafka scholars and highly recommendable to anyone interested in a renewal of historic criticism and cultural interpretation."--The German Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0198159072
• ISBN 13: 9780198159070
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 244