Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle » (1st Edition)

Scott Spector is Associate Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

"This admirably lucid, impressively well researched, and theoretically sophisticated book provides both a cultural history of Prague, focusing on its German-Jewish writers, and a broader context for reading Franz Kafka. It brings out the complex ways in which a 'minor' literature has a powerful if problematic political import."—Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University

"Prague Territories is a marvelous study of the 'Prague circle' writers of the generation of the 1890s, most notably Kafka, but also Max Brod, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Franz Werfel, among others. The book uses the figure of the circle as an organizing metaphor, both for the intersecting patterns of artistic collaboration and more abstractly in the hermeneutic sense. It is beautifully written and sensitively balances the at once overwhelming and yet fraternal presence of Kafka."—Carla Hesse, University of California, Berkeley

"A remarkably fresh, engaging study that breaks new ground."—Mark Anderson, Columbia University

"Organized with elegance, both conceptual and stylistic, the book combines historical and literary analysis at the cutting edges of both disciplines."—Michael P. Steinberg, Cornell University

Times Literary Supplement

[I]t . . . contribute[s] many insights and food for thought in a question, the relation of culture to territory, with which we are, as recent events in Europe show only too well, still grappling.