Kafka (A Brief Insight)

From a man who metamorphoses into an insect to a banker arrested on unspecified charges by a mysterious court, Franz Kafka’s fiction vividly evokes bizarre, almost surrealistic situations. 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. The result is an accessible portrait of a fascinating author that helps us understand his perplexing, absorbing work.

Ritchie Robertson is a Professor of German at Oxford University and a Fellow of St. John's College. He has published books on Kafka, Heinrich Heine, and Thomas Mann, and has translated several 18th- and 19th-century German authors into English for the Oxford World's Classics and Penguin Classics series.