“As Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.” So begins The Metamorphosis, a sinister allegory of dehumanization and hopelessness in the modern world by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Once rendered an… Read More ›
The Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote Amerika between 1911 and 1914, but the novel was not published until 1927, several years after the author’s death. Kafka never crossed the Atlantic to America, and much of his knowledge of the… Read More ›
The Castle is the last novel written by Czech author Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Kafka began to write the book in 1922 in a village and not, as it is tempting to imagine, in the shadow of Prague’s legendary castle. A… Read More ›
Nausea is the first novel by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), one of the most renowned novelists, dramatists, and philosophical writers in the French language of the 20th century. Sartre received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964, although he refused to… Read More ›
Franz Kafka’s (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) stories are not about love or success. They do not leave the reader feeling comfortable. Writing was, for him, a necessity. On August 6, 1914, Kafka wrote in his diary: “My… Read More ›
The name Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) conjures up images of a world without a center, of people alienated both from society and from themselves. Kafka lived at the threshold of the modern technological world, and… Read More ›
T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Descent of Man” is not the first American short story to carry the title of Darwin’s controversial study of the evolutionary development of man. However, Edith Wharton’s “The Descent of Man” (1904) uses the title of Darwin’s… Read More ›
University of Kannur M.A. English Literature ENG3E08 Third Semester European Fiction Scholarly Materials
One way to understand the modern novel is to show its development in the work of writers such as Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. This list is by no means exclusive, but… Read More ›
The uniqueness of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) stems, in large measure, from the intersection of writing and lived experience. Born into a Jewish family in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka was the son of a prosperous self-made businessman. Although his parents… Read More ›
Chicago has a long tradition of producing fine writers who use the city as their literary landscape. Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, and The odore Dreiser, among others, belong to this tradition. Stuart Dybek, while drawing heavily on the… Read More ›
Aestheticism European literary movement, with its roots in France, that was predominant in the 1890’s. It denied that art needed to have any utilitarian purpose and focused on the slogan “art for art’s sake.” The doctrines of aestheticism were introduced… Read More ›
“Fire and Cloud” in Uncle Tom’s Children is perhaps the best representative of Richard Wright’s early short fiction. It won first prize in the 1938 Story magazine contest which had more than four hundred entries, marking Wright’s first triumph with… Read More ›
Hermann Broch must surely be counted among such other major German novelists of the twentieth century as Franz Kafka, Mann, Robert Musil, Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass, alongside such other creative artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav… Read More ›
Washington Irving’s (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) masterpiece, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., has a historical importance few American books can match. No previous American book achieved a really significant popular and critical success in England,… Read More ›
Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927 – 2014) fiction is characterized by a thread of common themes, events, and characters that seem to link his work together into one multifaceted portrayal of the experiences of Latin American life. From the influences of his… Read More ›
Shirley Jackson’s (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) stories seem to center on a single concern: Almost every story is about a protagonist’s discovering or failing to discover or successfully ignoring an alternate way of perceiving a set of… Read More ›
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is a very American writer. Early in her career, she drew comparisons with such predecessors as Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. The chiefly rural and small-town milieu of her earlier work expanded over… Read More ›
If it is true that writers and artists should spend their entire lives and careers investigating, examining, and trying to understand the same themes, then Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949) is a prime example of how to do this… Read More ›
Modernism comprised a broad series of movements in Europe and America that came to fruition roughly between 1910 and 1930. Its major exponents and practitioners included Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Luigi… Read More ›
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