Everyone’s Darling: Kafka and the Critics of His Short Fiction

Over the past eighty years Kafka has been appropriated by every conceivable critical camp, encompassing the entire gamut of the intellectual tradition of the West, including its postmodern and feminist critics. Yet, as this studyshows for the first time, there is an underlying unity in all the diversity. What emerges from the critical Tower of Babel is that, at the core of Kafka’s art, there lies a consciously constructed ambiguity which cannot be resolved - except through over-simplification - but which nevertheless appears to make sense to some readers. Professor Kempf’s book combines survey and case study, using a selection of major critical voices, which fruitfully illuminateand comment on each other, to highlight the historical developments and discontinuities in the vast amount of critical literature devoted to Kafka.