The legacy of Kafka in contemporary Austrian literature

Perhaps one of the clues to answering the question of why Kafka's writing continues to be so compelling to a worldwide readership and why it has drawn such an enormous international range and scope of responses is that, despite its surreal appearances, Kafka's fictional world is a familiar, universal one. He revolutionized prose writing in the sense that almost all narrative authors who came later recognized his significance and were influenced by him, This still remains true in the present. -- The essays here show how Franz Kafka has impressed his seal on the identity of a number of Austrian writers; especially Aichinger, Canetti, Handke, Jelinek and Turrini.