By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Modernist literature is often concerned with modernity as a kind of living death, but perhaps no twentieth-century writer offered a more explicit parable of this fact than Franz Kafka in ‘The Hunter Gracchus’. This story, which exists as a brief six-page tale and an even shorter fragment, was among the posthumous papers which Kafka’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod, published after Kafka’s death in 1924. The story was written in the first half of 1917, and published in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer in 1931.