Kafka: A study

by Anthony Thorlby

gilt lettering to spine, mild sunning to d/j, minor creasing to top corner of FEP, red pen marks on some pages, otherwsie text clean and tight

101 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1972

About the author

Tony Thorlby was the first Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex. He was educated at Tonbridge School and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read Modern Languages and was taught by the great Germanist, Erich Heller. He then went to Yale where in 1953 he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on ‘Fatality in Four Novels of the Nineteenth Century’. He learned Russian during his National Service in the famous Joint Services School of Linguists, where Michael Frayn and Alan Bennett, as well as George Craig and Peter France, were also enrolled. D.M. Thomas, who was a contemporary, has written: “On my course the obvious leader—older, sophisticated, handsome, with a PhD,—a kind of admired Steerforth—was one A. K. Thorlby, later a distinguished academic. One felt he was on easy terms with the tutors and I envied him his air of insouciant superiority.”

Reviews

[atlas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been trying to get into more of Kafka's writings after finishing 'Investigations of a Dog' last year, and this was very helpful! Kafka's work is so complex that I do really recommend researching more into his writing style, motivations, and meanings behind the stories to help understand them more readily, and this essay is definitely up there as one of the best resources for this I've accessed yet.