Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer is an attempt to identify and properly contextualize the social critique in Kafkas biography and work that links father-son antagonisms, heterodox Jewish religious thinking, and anti-authoritarian or anarchist protest against the rising power of bureaucratic modernity. The book proceeds chronologically, starting with biographical facts often neglected or denied relating to Kafkas relations with the Anarchist circles in Prague, followed by an analysis of the three great unfinished novelsAmerika, The Trial, The Castleas well as some of his most important short stories. Fragments, parables, correspondence, and his diaries are also used in order to better understand the major literary works. Lwys book grapples with the critical and subversive dimension of Kafkas writings, which is often hidden or masked by the fabulistic character of the work. Lwys reading has already generated controversy because of its distance from the usual canon of literary criticism about the Prague writer, but the book has been well received in its original French edition and has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish.