Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald

By Daniel Medin and Daniel L. Medin

Book Overview

Franz Kafka was a self-conscious writer whose texts were highly if mysteriously autobiographical. Three giants of contemporary fiction--J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald--have all acknowledged their debt to the work of Kafka, both in interviews and in their own academic essays and articles for a general readership about him. In this striking feat of literary scholarship, Daniel Medin finds that the use of Kafka by Coetzee, Roth, and Sebald is similarly self-reflexive and autobiographical. That writers from such divergent national and ethnic traditions can have such unique critical readings of Kafka, and that Kafka could exert such a powerful influence over their oeuvres, Medin contends, attests to the central place of Kafka in the contemporary literary imagination.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810125684
• ISBN13: 9780810125681
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.8"