Anyone who follows the oscillations of literary criticism over the past twenty years cannot escape the impression that we are moving away from the tendency to treat literary works in isolation of their context characteristic of structuralism and post-structuralism and back towards the notion that the literary text refers to some sort of reality which really exists beyond the limits of the linguistic artifact. History and historicism are back. David Lodge, shrewdly utilizing Roman Jacobson's now famous binary schema built on the metaphoric/metonymic polarity, describes this movement from the autotelic to the referential as one from the metaphoric to the metonymic poles. This schema is particularly apt for a description of Kafka criticism since Kafka's own writing is a dazzling melange of metaphoric and metonymic utterances. In addition to the metaphoric/metonymic aspects of the fiction, the reader is always confronted by the fact that Kafka, while working on his fiction, which was usually patently free of references to specific objects or events in the external world, wrote reams of letters and diary entries, much of it heavily referential.

Kafka's interest in Jewish affairs and his obsession with his Jewish identity is a case in point: while the diaries and letters are full of references to these matters, his fiction is singularly free of them. It is not surprising that this disparity has intrigued readers and inspired scholars to search for the latent Jewish subtext in his fiction. The materials that enable one to pursue this avenue of research have been considerably expanded in the past decade by such biographical works as Ronald Hayman's KA Biography of Kafka (1981) and Ernst Pawel's The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (1984), both leaning heavily on Helmut Binder's and Klaus Wagenbach's biographical studies which have updated and corrected Max Brad's early - indispensable though not always reliable - biography.

Ritchie Robertson's book admittedly builds on the efforts of his predecessors, but attempts to utilize the historical information to interpret Kafka's works. The subtitle of his book: ‘Judaism, Politics and Literature’ is supposed to give a rough idea of its scope, but is both inadequate and misleading. This erudite volume is not merely a study of the the matics of Kafka's fiction; it purports to use both the historical background (including Kafka's reading) and the narrative techniques, to arrive at fresh interpretations of many of his works.