Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings

Contents; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Kafka's Hybrids: Thinking Animals and Mirrored Humans; Chapter 3 "Czechs, Jews and Dogs Not Allowed": Identity, Boundary, and Moral Stance in Kafka's "A Crossbreed" and "Jackals and Arabs"; Chapter 4 De-allegorizing Kafka's Ape: Two Animalistic Contexts; Chapter 5 Agents of the Forgotten: Animals as the Vehicles of Shame in Kafka; Chapter 6 The Difficult Task of Being Real: Odradek, the Kittenlamb, and the Historical Individual; Chapter 7 Consolation in Your Neighbor's Fur: On Kafka's Animal Parables.;There are few literary authors in whose work animals and other creatures play as prominent a role as they do in Franz Kafka's. Exploring multiple dimensions of Kafka's incorporation of nonhuman creatures into his writing, this volume is the first collection in English of essays devoted to illuminating this important and ubiquitous dimension of his work. The chapters here are written by an array of international scholars from various fields, and represent a diversity of interpretive approaches. In the course of exploring the roles played by nonhuman animals and other creatures in Kafka's writin.