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Kafka's animal stories have, until recently, "been read as fabular or allegorical" (Norris 26), or as indirect meditations on the human condition. Two recent books on Kafka's non-human animals, Kafka's Creatures (2012) and Kafka's Zoopoetics (2020), argue instead for the ubiquity and centrality of non-human animals primarily as non-allegorical beings. In the final chapter of Kafka's Creatures, Donna Yarri indexes all living, non-human creatures in Kafka's fiction, diaries, letters and notebooks. Her catalogue lists more than 50 named species in Kafka's extant fiction, which is a surprisingly low number in relation to animal-centric and canonical modern writers. Although the sample size is limited, the case of Kafka is a clear outlier: there are more than 400 named animal species in Vladimir Nabokov's fiction; 350 distinct animal species in Herman Melville's; 300 animal species in Virginia Woolf's; and 150 species of animals in Joseph Conrad's fiction.1 In addition, there are more named animal species in a single book by Ernst Jünger (In Stahlgewittern, 1920–1978), Thomas Mann (Der Zauberberg, 1924), Günter Grass (Die Blechtrommel, 1959), Robert Musil (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930), Alfred Döblin (Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929), and Joseph Roth (Radetzkymarsch, 1932) than in Kafka's entire oeuvre.2 This list is by no means exhaustive; its aim is to suggest that even authors not commonly noted for writing on animals tend to mention a significantly higher number of animal species than Kafka. Put differently, names for animal species are common-use words. When they are not present to an expected degree within a sample, it is statistically significant: it is unlikely to be a consequence of chance, but of a characteristic.
Although Kafka's extant writings have fewer aggregate word tokens than each of the aforementioned writers, the aggregate size of a writer's literary production has little correlation to the size of his or her total vocabulary (number of word types).3 For instance, Kafka's Das Schloss (The Castle) has more than five times the number of word tokens than Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), but only twice the number of word types. Moreover, there is no indication that Kafka has a non-standardized type/token ratio (a measure of vocabulary richness).4 Furthermore, according to Yarri's...