Kafka's Clothes Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Sicle [Paperback]

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 ofThe MetamorphosisandThe 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.

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 especialllc?