Kafka's Clothes

This highly acclaimed study explores Kafka's early dandyism and 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 isolated, otherwordly `poet' of modern alienation. In its discussion of Jugendstil 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, Kafka's Clothes paints a startlingly unconventional portrait of Kafka and Prague at the turn of the century.