New essays by leading scholars on major aspects of the most significant Austrian writer of the postwar generation. Since the death of Thomas Bernhard in 1989, the literary reputation of this complex and unique writer has risen to the point that he is now regarded as a major European figure. Bernhard emerged in the 1960s as one of Austria's major writers, challenging the popularity of such established writers as Heinrich Boell and Gunter Grass on the German literary scene. His idiosyncratic prose consists of a tragic-comic blend of themes such as suicide, madness, and isolation combined with highly satirical and histrionic invectives against culture, tradition, and society. As a skillful impresario of public scandals by means of verbal assaults upon Austrian elite culture, Bernhard also earned himself the epithet of UEbertreibungskunstler (artist of exaggeration). In this art of cultural and political provocation Bernhard remains unmatched to the present day. This volume of essays provides contributions by well-known critics that examine the most salient aspects of Bernhard's work, offering insights into literary strategies and public themes that made Bernhard one of Europe's masters of modern prose and drama. Essays examine Bernhard's complex artistic sensibility, his impact on Austria's critical memory, his relation to the legacy of Austrian Jewish culture, his representative value as Austria's prime literary export, and his cosmopolitanism and its significance forthe rapidly changing multicultural landscape of Europe. Matthias Konzett is associate professor of German at Yale University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek (Camden House, 2000). Click here to view the introduction (PDF file 97KB)

Franz Kafka's classic 1915 novella remains one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. This Norton Critical Edition is based on Susan Bernofsky's acclaimed new translation, accompanied by the translator's note and Mark M. Anderson's preface and explanatory annotations.

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.