The purpose of the article is to discuss the perception of Kafka's The Castle (Das Schloss, 1922) in the novels The Peaches Killers (Die Pfirsichtöter, 1972) by Alfred Kolleritsch, Among the Bieresch (Bei den Bieresch, 1979) by Klaus Hoffer and Into the Castle (Ins Schloss, 2004) by Marianne Gruber. The reference to the writers and their works is no coincidence; preference is given to the artists whose creative manner reflects the most fashionable trends in Western European literary process - from avant-garde to postmodernism. The authors of the article deliberately arrange the analysed works in chronological order to follow the stages in the development of German postmodernism which originates from modernist literature. The universal Kafkaesque discourse suggests the existence of direct and inverse connections between the author and the reader, the extra-textual tradition and reality. The article focuses on the narrative strategies of Austrian avant-garde (Kolleritsch), analyses postmodern discourse (Hoffer, Gruber) in the Austrian literature of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries, reveals signs of typological similarity between the novels by Kafka, Kolleritsch, Hoffer, and Gruber, which seems productive for understanding the influence of modernist literature on the development of the postmodern paradigm in the German-language literary space. Austrian literature, to a greater extent, is fraught with the search for new forms of self-expression rather than with the artistic “overcoming the past” - the awareness of collective guilt.  It brought to the forefront the authors in whose works the age of change was reflected. Literary avant-garde has been replaced by authors who skillfully “play” with the previous culture and establish a dialogue with the present. The comparative methodology is to reveal the perception of "Kafkaesque discourse" in modern Austrian literature and to draw conclusions about the ways authors treat ontological questions.

The purpose of the article is to consider the originality of the art world of the contemporary Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth who created in the novel Mistress of the Animals a unique "animalistic context". Frischmuth explores human nature through the images of the animal world, in connection with which the author of the article adheres to the term "human-animal studies". "Human-animal studies" in the works of the writer have a mythological nature, with the help of which Frischmuth illustrates the modern world. The relevance of the study is dictated by the inadequate exploration in homeland literary studies of the Austrian writer B. Frischmuth. Hence, considering the work of the Austrian writer in this context, this research is an attempt to pastose  the generalised characteristic of "animalier art". The undertaken study considers the understudied topical problems of modernity, given the literary experience of Barbara Frischmuth. In the animal work Frishmuths"anthropological" and "zoological" are transformed in a specific synthesis; this duality characterises animal characters in her works, and would become a hallmark of her work.

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