The World of Franz Kafka

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"In The World of Franz Kafka, Professor J.P. Stern, the internationally respected critic and historian of modern German literature, brings together a number of writings on widely varying aspects of Kafka's life, work and milieu, most of them specially commissioned for this volume. The book is divided into three parts: the first is biographical, covering such topics as the social and cultural environment of Prague in the last years of the Habsburg Empire; Kafka's own Jewish background and problematic family life; his mysterious unfulfilled relationships with women; and it includes reminiscences, some never before published in English. In the second section of the book Martin Walser, Frank Kermode, Erich Heller, Walter Sokel, Anthony Thorlby, and others deal with the literary problems of interpreting Kafka's work, while the concluding part of the book contains fictional or semi-fictional pieces by writers like Roy Fuller, Philip Roth, and D.J. Enright that were inspired by Kafka and in their turn shed fresh light on him"--Book jacket.