Presents a collection of critical essays about Kafka's The metamorphosis.

This essential collection of Franz Kafka's writings includes classic as well as new translations: "The Metamorphosis" "The Judgment" "A Country Doctor "In the Penal Colony" From A Hunger Artist ("First Sorrow," "A Little Woman," "A Hunger Artist," "Josephine, the Singer; or, The Mouse People") "The Hunter Gracchus" "The Great Wall of China" "Letter to His Father">

A Study Guide for Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

Franz Kafka, the author has very nicely narrated the story of Gregou Samsa who wakes up one day to discover that he has metamorphosed into a bug. The book concerns itself with the themes of alienation and existentialism. The author has written many important stories, including ‘The Judgement’, and much of his novels ‘Amerika’, ‘The Castle’, ‘The Hunger Artist’. Many of his stories were published during his lifetime but many were not. Over the course of the 1920s and 30s Kafka’s works were published and translated instantly becoming landmarks of twentieth-century literature. Ironically, the story ends on an optimistic note, as the family puts itself back together. The style of the book epitomizes Kafka’s writing. Kafka very interestingly, used to present an impossible situation, such as a man’s transformation into an insect, and develop the story from there with perfect realism and intense attention to detail. The Metamorphosis is an autobiographical piece of writing, and we find that parts of the story reflect Kafka’s own life.

This book is divided into tour chapters in addition to a conclusion: chapter one is an introduction to focuses on the two winters' contribution, reputation and influence. Chapter two is devoted to a critical appreciation of William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily. Chapter Three is devoted to a critical appreciation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Chapter four gives a brief study of comparison and contract of the two writers stories, A Rose for Emily and The Metamorphosis. Finally, the book ends with the conclusion that there are strong resemblances in the characters of “A Rose for Emily and The Metamorphosis. Miss Emily and Samsa, both, they were affected by the same kind of isolation. Both were deeply affected by the injustices of the society and family.

'When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.' With a bewildering blend of the everyday and the fantastical, Kafka thus begins his most famous short story, The Metamorphosis. A commercial traveller is unexpectedly freed from his dreary job by his inexplicable transformation into an insect, which drastically alters his relationship with his family. Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgement also concerns family tensions, when a power struggle between father and son ends with the father passing an enigmatic judgement on the helpless son. The third story, In the Penal Colony, explores questions of power, justice, punishment, and the meaning of pain in a colonial setting. These three stories are flanked by two very different works. Meditation, the first book Kafka published, consists of light, whimsical, often poignant mood-pictures, while in the autobiographical Letter to his Father, Kafka analyses his difficult relationship in forensic and devastating detail. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The origins of selected instances of metamorphosis in Germanic literature are traced from their roots in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, grouped roughly on an ‘ascending evolutionary scale’ (invertebrates, birds, animals, and mermaids). Whilst a broad range of mythological, legendary, fairytale and folktale traditions have played an appreciable part, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is still an important comparative analysis and reference point for nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language narratives of transformations. Metamorphosis is most often used as an index of crisis: an existential crisis of the subject or a crisis in a society’s moral, social or cultural values. Specifically selected texts for analysis include Jeremias Gotthelf’s Die schwarze Spinne (1842) with the terrifying metamorphoses of Christine into a black spider, the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915), ambiguous metamorphoses in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf (1814), Hermann Hesse’s Piktors Verwandlungen (1925), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt (1988). Other mythical metamorphoses are examined in texts by Bachmann, Fouqué, Fontane, Goethe, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Thomas Mann and Wagner, and these and many others confirm that metamorphosis is used historically, scientifically, for religious purposes; to highlight identity, sexuality, a dream state, or for metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical reasons.

'A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern canonisation: Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure to read.' Marina Warner In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself. Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.

Fresh from the magic kingdom of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, this non-academic author ushers us line-by-line into the shadows of Kafka's spectral bug theater. He walks the bug back along hints left by Kafka as to what happened the night before, why that night was different from all other nights. In this reading, father Samsa betrayed his first-born and needy son Gregor by declaring him unwelcome at home, even though Gregor was paying the rent. Stimulated by this betrayal of blood by blood, the twilight zone opened momentarily allowing father's brutality to transform the son into a giant bug. Three months later, the combined protective forces of Easter and Passover are necessary to finally put the creature to rest: Easter for his spirit and Passover for his bug body. Using then-current formulas from psychoanalysis as to hysterical conversion and from psychodynamics as to the human energy system, this explanation locates in a story often found mysterious a coherent path to the lack of memory by Gregor of these events and the reason for his hard back and soft underbelly. As the author sees it, irony fuels the title because the metamorphosis changed Gregor's exterior but not his inner nature, his "indestructible" love for family, while just the opposite happened to his convenience-loving family. And irony fuels the results because father Samsa got just the lazy and dependent son he criticized Gregor for being in wanting to stay at home. The author traces how Kafka uses verb tense and aspect, psycho-narration, as well as changes in the narrator's voice to make meaning in this drama theater. In the last act and after Gregor is disposed of by a Mary Magdalene-suggesting charwoman, the parents prepare their last child, their daughter, for departure, which will leave them in complete convenience. For her they have saved a nest egg that will help supply a nest for her family eggs, a family nest denied to their first-born.

The eight papers in this volume were originally presented at the centennial conference on Franz Kafka held at the University of Calgary in October 1983. As diverse in approach and methodology as these papers are "the general drift of the volume is away from Germanistik towards 'state-of-the-art' methods." The opening articles by Charles Bernheimer and James Rolleston both deal with the similarities and contrasts between Kafka and Flaubert, with Bernheimer focusing on the "I" and the dilemma of narration in Kafka's early story, "Wedding Preparation in the Country," and Rolleston on the time-dimensions in the Kafka's work that link him to the Romantics. Other articles in the volume deal with the complex interrelationships between author and narrator, and implied author and implied reader; with Kafka's place in the European fable tradition and in classic and Romantic religious traditions; with Kafka's diaries; and with his female protagonists.