Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing [Hardcover]

In 1916, Kafka writes of The Sugar Baron , a dime-store colonial adventure novel, '[it] affects me so deeply that I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules for my life.' John Zilcosky reveals that this perhaps surprising statement - made by the Prague-bound poet of modern isolation - is part of a network of remarks that exemplify Kafka's ongoing preoccupation with popular travel writing, exoticism, and colonial fantasy. Taking this biographical peculiarity as a starting point, Kafka's Travels elegantly re-reads Kafka's major works ( Amerika , The Trial , The Castle ) through the lens of fin-de siecle travel culture. Making use of previously unexplored literary and cultural materials - travel diaries, train schedules, tour guides, adventure novels - Zilcosky argues that Kafka's uniquely modern metaphorics of alienation emerges out of the author's complex encounter with the utopian travel discourses of his day.Introduction: Kafka's Travels? Transcending the Exotic: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and Kafka's Early Travel Novel, Richard and Samuel The America Novel: Learning How to Get Lost Travelling at Home: The Trial and the Exotic Heimat Savage Travel: Sadism and Masochism in In the Penal Colony Surveying the Castle: Kafka's Colonial Visions The Traffic of Writing: Technologies of Verkehr in the Letters to Milena Epilogue: Kafka's Remains: Travel, Death, and the Exotic Journey Home

'[T]here is much to be said for [Zilcosky's] new, postcolonial Kafka.' - Times Literary Supplement