20世紀の人気作家、フランツ・カフカ（1883-1924年）。代表作の『変身』に照らし、罪と絶望、贖い、そして愛といったテーマに取り組んだカフカ文学を、身体、制度、宗教などを軸に読み解きます。伝記的事実や時代的・文化的背景、創作技法の特徴もおさえつつ、カフカ理解の基本となるポイントを目配りよくまとめています。カフカの愛読者はもとより、これからその世界に触れようという読者にもお薦めです。(cf. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics))
    

• This is the most up-to-date book on Kafka, a much-read and much-studied writer of enduring appeal
• A short, accessible, and attractive book for general readers which focuses on the themes and motifs in Kafka's work

  
'When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect ...' So begins Franz Kafka's most famous story Metamorphosis.
  
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is among the most intriguing and influential writers of the twentieth century. During his lifetime he worked as a civil servant and published only a handful of short stories, the best known being The Transformation. All three of his novels, The Trial, The Castle, and The Man Who Disappeared [America], were published after his death and helped to found Kafka's reputation as a uniquely perceptive interpreter of the twentieth century.
  
Kafka's fiction vividly evokes bizarre situations: a commercial traveller is turned into an insect, a banker is arrested by a mysterious court, a fasting artist starves to death in the name of art, a singing mouse becomes the heroine of her nation. 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 after Nietzsche had proclaimed 'the death of God'. The result is an up-to-date and accessible portrait of a fascinating author which shows us ways to read and make sense of his perplexing and absorbing work.