Frederick Robert Karl Knihy

With wide format pages to give generous margins for notes, the editor presents the latest Conrad scholarship in an introduction, and also includes notes, selected criticism and a chronology of the author's life and times.

From the cauldron of fin-de-siècle Middle Europe emerged the writer who most startlingly embodies this century's artistic vision and whose name is virtually synonymous with the century—<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5223.Franz_Kafka" title="Franz Kafka" rel="nofollow noopener">Franz Kafka</a>. The definitive critical biography of one of the world's greatest writers, <i>Franz Kafka: Representative Man</i> examines Kafka as the quintessential expression of modernism. Not just a personal biography, <i>Franz Kafka: Representative Man</i> presents a vivid and authoritative picture of the historical, cultural, and artistic world from which Kafka arose, examining the entire body of his writing in light of his status as the representative man of our time. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/10017.Freud" title="Freud" rel="nofollow noopener">Freud</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1938.Nietzsche" title="Nietzsche" rel="nofollow noopener">Nietzsche</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9810.Einstein" title="Einstein" rel="nofollow noopener">Einstein</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3253.Picasso" title="Picasso" rel="nofollow noopener">Picasso</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7906.Rilke" title="Rilke" rel="nofollow noopener">Rilke</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/94724.Mahler" title="Mahler" rel="nofollow noopener">Mahler</a>, and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8280.Stravinsky" title="Stravinsky" rel="nofollow noopener">Stravinsky</a>—all were a part of the radically subversive movement known as modernism, and all are included in Dr. Karl's monumental study. Yet of all these brilliant minds that transformed our notions of the human condition, it is Kafka who has come to embody our century. Informed by a lifetime of thought and research, and drawing on newly discovered letters—not yet translated into English—from Kafka to his parents, Frederick Karl, the acclaimed biographer of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35153367.Conrad" title="Conrad" rel="nofollow noopener">Conrad</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/159093.Faulkner" title="Faulkner" rel="nofollow noopener">Faulkner</a>, leads us on an intellectual journey through the labyrinth of Prague, amid the growing ethnic tensions that would explode in the Second World War, in an empire struggling with its national identity and on the verge of collapse. Dr. Karl, with astonishing command and penetrating insight, interweaves the many strands of person, place, and time to illuminate Kafka the individual, the artist, and the representative man. This book is an invaluable contribution to literary studies and the history of modern culture.