This book is a compact study of Kafka's inimitable literary style,
animals, and ecological thought--his nonhuman form--that proceeds
through original close readings of Kafka's oeuvre. With select
engagements of Adorno, Derrida, and the literary heritage from
Romanticism to Dickens that influenced Kafka, Ted Geier discusses
Kafka's literary, "nonhuman" form and the way it unsettles the notion of
a natural and simple existence that society and culture impose,
including the boundaries between human and animal. Through careful
attention to the formal predicaments of Kafka's works and engaging with
Kafka's original legal and social thought in his novels and short
stories, this book renders Kafka's sometimes impossibly enigmatic work
legible at the level of its expression, bringing surprising shape to his
work and redefining what scholars and readers have understood as the
"Kafkaesque".