"One should either be a work of art, or wear one," proclaimed Oscar Wilde at the end of the nineteenth century; "I am made of literature, I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else," Franz Kafka declared a decade later. Between these two claims lies the largely unexplored region in which the European decadent movement turned into the modernist avant-garde. In this original historical study, Anderson explores Kafka's early dandyism, his interest in fashion, literary decadence and the "superficial" spectacle of modern urban life as well as his subsequent repudiation of these phenomena in...

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

- Susan Bernofsky's acclaimed new translation, along with her Translator's Note. - Introductory materials and explanatory footnotes by Mark M. Anderson - Three illustrations - Related texts by Kafka, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others - Eight critical essays by Gunther Anders, Walter H. Sokel, Nina Pelikan Straus, Mark M. Anderson, Elizabeth Boa, Carolin Duttlinger, Kari Driscoll, and Dan Miron - A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography