Arbuckle, Donald E. and James B. Misenheimer, Jr. "Personal Failure in 'The Egg' and 'A Hunger Artist'." The Winesburg Eagle: The Official Publication of the Sherwood Anderson Society 8, No. 2 (April 1983): 1-3.

Compares the fates of the protagonists in Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg" and Kafka's "A Hunger Artist." In both cases, the critics note, "the protagonists try to make their bleak existences important to others and fail miserably."

Foulkes, A. P. "The Cage Image in Ein Bericht für Eine Akademie and Ein Hungerkünstler" In The Reluctant Pessimist: A Study of Franz Kafka, pp. 90-7. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.

Examines the cage image in "A Hunger Artist" and "A Report to an Academy," and contrasts the outlooks on life offered by these stories.

Garrison, Joseph, Jr. "Getting into the Cage: A Note on Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist'." The International Fiction Review 8, No. 1 (Winter 1981): 61-3.

Views the narrator rather than the hunger artist as the central figure of Kafka's short story.

Honig, Edwin. "The Expanding Analogy." In Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory, pp. 115-28. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1959.

Views Kafka as an allegorist who identifies his hunger artist with Christ.

Kaplan, Morton and Robert Kloss. "Fantasy of the Devouring Killer: Kafka's A Hunger Artist." In The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Criticism, p. 80. New York: Free Press, 1973.

Asserts that "A Hunger Artist" "is perhaps one of the most powerful, perfectly told tales ever written."

McFarland, Ronald E. "Community and Interpretive Communities in Stories by Hawthorne, Kafka and García Márquez." Studies in Short Fiction 29, No. 4 (Fall 1992): 551-59.

Holds that at least three communities are involved in Kafka's "A Hunger Artist," Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil": that represented by the spectators, the "interpretive community" of readers, and the "real-life communities" in which the readers participate.

Michaelson, L. W. "Kafka's Hunger Artist and Baudelaire's Old Clown." Studies in Short Fiction 5 (1968): 293.

Asserts that the old clown in Baudelaire's Le Vieux Saltimbanque "has many points in sympathy with the hunger artist."

Mitchell, Breon. "Kafka and the Hunger Artists." In Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, edited by Alan Udoff, pp. 236-52. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Examines the possible historical sources for "A Hunger Artist," including actual hunger artists of the nineteenth century.

Moyer, Patricia. "Time and the Artist in Kafka and Hawthorne." Modern Fiction Studies 4, No. 4 (Winter 1958-59): 295-306.

Asserts that "in 'The Artist of the Beautiful' and 'The Hunger Artist' Hawthorne and Kafka make their most definitive poetic statements about the position of the artist in the modern world."

Neumarkt, Paul. "Kafka's A Hunger Artist: The Ego in Isolation." American Imago 27, No. 2 (Summer 1970): 109-21.

Analyzes the stories collected in A Hunger Artist from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Norris, Margot. "Sadism and Masochism in Two Kafka Stories: 'In der Strafkolonie' and 'Ein Hungerkünstler'." Modern Language Notes 93, No. 3 (April 1978): 430-47.

Points out the "striking structural symmetry" of In the Penal Colony and "A Hunger Artist," noting that "in each, a fanatical believer in meaningful suffering reenacts a spectacle that in an earlier age drew huge, festival crowds, but now results only in sordid death and burial."

Pasley, J. M. S. "Asceticism and Cannibalism: Notes on an Unpublished Kafka Text." Oxford German Studies 1 (1966): 102-13.

Views the fanatical characters of Kafka's works, including the hunger artist, as representing an aspect of Kafka himself.

Satz, Martha and Zsuzsanna Ozsvath. 'A Hunger Artist and In the Penal Colony in the Light of Schopenhauerian Metaphysics." German Studies Review 1, No. 2 (May 1978): 200-10.

Considers Kafka's short stories "A Hunger Artist" and "In the Penal Colony" in the context of the views of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The critics observe: "The heroic Artist and Saint figures of Schopenhauer, men who have attained insight by annihilating their will to live, have become the distorted and dubious figures of the Hunger Artist and the Officer in the 'Penal Colony'."

Spann, Meno. "Don't Hurt the Jackdaw." The Germanic Review XXXVII, No. 1 (January 1962): 68-78.

Insists that "A Hunger Artist" is autobiographical rather than allegorical and denies that the central figure represents "the suffering artist or saint in modern society." The story, Meno declares, "is Kafka's swan-song and that evasive ironist's affirmation of nature and life."

——. "The Last Metamorphoses." In Franz Kafka, pp. 164-73. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.

Surveys the prevailing critical interpretations of "A Hunger Artist."

Wood, Cecil. "On the Tendency of Nature to Imitate Art." The Minnesota Review VI, No. 2 (1966): 133-48.

Examines "A Hunger Artist" and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and their treatment of the idealist in a materialistic society.

Additional coverage of Kafka's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 105, 126; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 81; Discovering Authors; Discovering Authors: British; Discovering Authors: Canadian; Discovering Authors: Modules—Most-Studied Authors Module and Novelists Module; Major Twentieth-Century Writers; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 5; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 2, 6, 13, 29, 47, 53; World Literature Criticism.