'Boa certainly is very differentiated and admiringly clear in analyzing the intricate wyas in which gender, class, and race from complex conspiracies both in the fiction and in the letters of Franz Kafka.'Elfriede Poder, Austrian History Yearbook, Vol.31, 2000.'It is a book that Kafka scholars need to ponder.'Germanic Notes and Reviews'a series of wide-ranging often perceptive readings of the letters and fiction . This study consolidates and adds to recent research on Kafka's relation to his social and ideological circumstances . The ambiguities in Kafka's construction of women are well brought out, and a detailed and generally persuasive case is made that gender plays a crucial role in the nexus of Kafka's themes and, indeed, in much of literary modernism. For these reasons, andalso because critics will find much to take issue with in the wealth of detail with which Boa presents her case, the book is likely to become a focal study in Kafka criticism.

'William J Dodd, MLR 95.1, 2000'To the author's credit, this implicitly political project is made overt without blunting literary critical sensibilities . a sensitive treatment of an oft-neglected aspect of his work.'Richard Heinemann, Madison, Winsconsin, Modern Philology'Elizabeth Boa's book is a stimulating and at times controversial account of gender, class and race in Kafka's letters and works of fiction'Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol 35, no 3, 1999.