Kafka's Clothes
Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle
Mark M. Anderson
Price: £22.00 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-815907-0
Publication date: 29 December 1994
264 pages, 30 halftones, 216x138 mm
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| Reviews |
| - 'This rich and subtle study sets new standards for historical and textual interpretation of Kafka.' - Modern Language Review
- 'by far the most important Kafka book to appear since the early work of Klaus Wagenbach in the 1960s' - Monatshefte
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| Description |
'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 proclaimed a brief 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 highly
acclaimed, original historical study, Mark 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 book demonstrates how clothing functions as a semi-private code of meaning in his literary works and the extent to which the aestheticist notion of becoming
the work of art haunts Kafka's conception of writing throughout his life.
The result is a startlingly unconventional
portrait of Kafka and Prague at the turn of the century, involving such issues as Jugendstil aesthetics, Otto Weininger's 'egoless' woman, the Viennese critique of architectural ornament, the clothing-reform movement, anti-Semitism, and the questions of Jewish-German writing.
From reviews of the hardback
:
'This rich and subtle study sets new standards for historical and textual
interpretation of Kafka.'
Ritchie Robertson, The Modern Language Review
'by far the most important Kafka book to appear since the early work of Klaus Wagenbach in the 1960s'
Monatshefte
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Mark M. Anderson, Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
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The specification in this catalogue, including without
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and month of publication, was as accurate as
possible at the time the catalogue was compiled.
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