While his memory languished under Nazi censorship, Franz Kafka covertly circulated through occupied France and soon emerged as a cultural icon, read by the most influential intellectuals of the time as a prophet of the rampant bureaucracy, totalitarian oppression, and absurdity that branded the twentieth century. In tracing the history of Kafka's reception in postwar France, John T. Hamilton explores how the work of a German-Jewish writer from Prague became a modern classic capable of addressing universal themes of the human condition.

Hamilton also considers how Kafka's unique literary corpus came to stimulate reflection in diverse movements, critical approaches, and philosophical schools, from surrealism and existentialism through psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and structuralism to Marxism, deconstruction, and feminism. The story of Kafka's afterlife in Paris thus furnishes a key chapter in the unfolding of French theory, which continues to guide how we read literature and understand its relationship to the world.

France/Kafka: An Author in Theory shows John T. Hamilton at a new peak of his scholarly powers and demonstrates what Comparative Literature can accomplish today. An elegant dance in French, German, and English, Hamilton's book provides a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka's aerolithic impact within the French intellectual context from surrealism and existentialism to feminism and deconstruction. Kafka, who considered himself a spiritual son of Gustave Flaubert, turns out to be the elusive godfather of French theory. While unfolding an erudite dossier of a century of cultural history, France/Kafka discreetly designs its own literary theory, revealing all reading as Übersetzung. Franz Kafka is an author in continued translation: John T. Hamilton passes on the Imperial Message for the 21st century.