This article, through close textual analysis, compares the oral and literary dynamics of two narrative pieces: Johann Peter Hebel's Unexpected Meeting (1811) and E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Mines of Falun ...(1819). Against a background of their almost coterminous birth and death dates, respectively 1766-1826 and 1776-1822, and the close publication dates of these narratives, the line of argument explores the individual approaches of Hebel and Hoffmann as they flesh out the same story in completely different ways. It argues that both authors follow their own aesthetic principles, the former influenced by Enlightenment values and the latter mediating the preoccupations of German Romanticism.
Established criticism argues that the influence of the German fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) on Nikolai Gogol's Russian supernatural tales was short-lived. This article disagrees. ...Gogol (1809-1852) achieved literary success in the late 1830s, when the future course of Russian literature was strongly indebted to late German Romantic literary concepts. We trace the relationship of Hoffmann's short story Don Juan: a Fabulous Incident which Befell a Travelling Enthusiast with the early and late versions of Gogol's short story The Portrait, showing that Hoffmannesque elements are stronger in the later publication. Our close analysis uses two critical theories: Shlovsky's concept of defamiliarisation, or ostranienie (Note 1), and Todorov's theories of the fantastic, the one being apposite on account of its Russian perspective, and the other because of its insights into Gothic literature. We also support our argument by historical and biographical evidence, with the overarching aim of bringing new critical perspectives to the study of the short fiction of Hoffmann and Gogol.
Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) was an eclectic writer and voracious reader during a historical period when western literary influence flourished in Japan. This article hypothesizes that the German novel, ...The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819-1821), by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), is as strong a formative influence in terms of structure and satirical perspective on Sōseki's novel, I Am a Cat (1905-1907), as other satiric contenders. It pursues this argument by examining correlations between these two polyphonic novels which mix many registers and discourses in a similar way. Biographical, historical and literary analysis underpins this comparison.
As diaries, letters and the intensive intertextuality of his prose fiction show, the German Romantic writer and composer, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), was an obsessive bibliophile and polymath. The ...aim of this article is to explore how far three of his literary fairy tales, The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairy Tale (1814), The Strange Child (1816) and The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), use the generic conventions of the fairy tale, and how far they are influenced by his voracious reading, his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature, and his engagement with contemporary debates. We conclude with brief observations about his literary legacy in the genres of fairy tales and fantasy fiction.
During this period of rapid political and cultural change, Hoffmann worked intermittently as a composer (his first love), writer, and lawyer, his creative side often being forced into keeping company ...with the necessity of earning a living or even just surviving. "9 Indeed, Hoffmann may well have adapted the frame structure of Phantasus in his collection of tales, The Serapion Brothers (1819-1821).10 Tieck's radical fairy tales frequently illustrate the dilemma of the writer facing the choice of either following his poetic vocation or suppressing his creative side in order to live in the material world. Before turning on her pillow and going back to sleep, she bids him send Rasmus some new stockings because his are worn out at the knees, and tells him not to return until he has found his reflection lest he should be a complete laughing-stock.12 "Adventure's" comic plot of a pact with the devil also specifically alludes to Goethe's Faust (1808). ...the intertextual relationship between Hoffmann's tale and "Runenberg," Schlemihl, and Faust comprises an ironic switch from tragedy to comedy. Hoffmann was steeped in German Romanticism, obsessed to such a degree that he read philosophical and literary books, including the work of the Schlegel brothers while ill in bed.13 August and Friedrich Schlegel, as co-creators of the journal Atheneum, were the first critics to use the term "Romantic" of the contemporary aesthetics, and Friedrich in particular had a major influence on Hoffmann.14 Adapting material from Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, Friedrich (hence forth Schlegel) participated in the Romantic practice of drawing on heterogeneous sources.15 His critical observations take the form of fragments, a style that became typical of European Romantic writing, and his declarative numbered critical statements amount to more
This socio-linguistic study of a selection of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s literary fairy tales, particularly “Princess Brambilla: A capriccio in the style of Jacques Callot” (1820), focuses on his revisioning ...of contemporary social discourses on gender. Conventionally, these discourses depicted men as dominating and women as subservient, whereas Hoffmann’s wide range of fairy-tale characters subverts a strict gender differentiation. The authors’ use of a Bakhtinian method to disentangle interdependent narrative strands in this carnivalesque fairy tale reveals its lack of a single patriarchal ideology. By exploring the relationship between “Brambilla”’s unconventional heroine Giacinta-Brambilla, and unheroic hero Giglio-Chiapperi, their argument demonstrates how Giacinta’s dominance facilitates Giglio’s developing self-knowledge. Through examining differing critical interpretations of Hoffmann’s presentation of women, the authors argue that, set against the normative values of his time, “Princess Brambilla” takes a subversive position. In short, Hoffmann’s fairy tales, in their historical context, offered a new way to interpret gender.
This article argues that contrary to late-eighteenth, and early-nineteenth, century sexual politics and contemporary literary practice, the work of E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822) subverts the accepted ...polarization of the sexes. This is shown in the choice and treatment of character and plot in Hoffmann's works of prose fiction, and in how he employs tone and narratorial voice. Drawing on a wide selection from Hoffmann's stories, some examined in detail, we show how his writing permits widely differing critical readings. We use Booker's theories to support our contention that Hoffmann's approach to gender is non-conformist. We also extend the critical arguments of Mattli, Bronfen, and Schmidt, and counter-argue against those of Hadlock, Asche, and Von Matt with regard to confined, comatose, and dead or dying women. We show that, in critiquing Romantic discourses on the muse, Hoffmann's work gives a voice to marginalized women, and lampoons bigoted men. We use a combination of historical, literary, allegorical, and folkloric critical approaches to support our argument that Hoffmann's fictional writing destabilizes a strict demarcation of gender; we thereby defend him against imputations of misogyny.
Hatless and coatless, the Traveling Enthusiast, the main narrator of E. T. A. Hoffmann's literary fairy tale 'A New Year's Eve Adventure' shuttlecocks his way from a celebration party to a beer ...cellar and then to the Golden Eagle Inn, where he spends the night because his house key is in the pocket of his abandoned coat. Written in a style that combines fantasy and realism, 'Adventure' was published in the fourth volume of Hoffmann's first collection of stories and anecdotes called Fantasy Pieces (1815). Its complex structure contains another fairy tale, titled 'The Story of the Lost Reflection,' and a description of a dream embedded within the Enthusiast's longer narrative. The dream compresses and distorts all the elements of the outer narrative. This narrative is itself framed by a fictional editor's introduction and a postscript from the narrator to the author: 'my dear Amadeus, Theodore Hoffmann' (Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, 2.1: 359). In addition, Adelbert von Chamisso's contemporary novella-cum-fairy tale, Peter Schlemihl (1813), is alluded to throughout, along with copious references to the Old Masters, which bring painterly as well as literary and kinetic resonance to the text. Convolutions and multiple allusions in Adventure suggest that the Enthusiast's storytelling signifies much more than the drunken ramblings of his body and mind. These seemingly random events as he capers around Berlin have a similar kinetic and spatial direction to dancing in a spin, circle, or chain. Although it is unlikely that a direct line of influence can be traced from such dance configurations to the fairy tale's plot, circumstantial connections are strong. Even though mapping the momentum and ephemerality of dance steps onto the creative practice of writing a narrative would be impossible, in this instance dance narratives and postures have certainly transferred from one to the other.1 Our contention is that the apparently haphazard rambling of Adventure has also been influenced and shaped by the medieval concept of the Dance of Death. This dance manifests itself in a number of ways. It is frequently depicted in medieval manuscripts, on the walls of European churches, and in the work of master painters and engravers; it was once performed during the quasi-legendary outbreaks of the European dancing plague; last, it is alluded to in the titles of traditional folk dances and is configured in their patterns of movement. We claim that folk dance, as an artistic form, is part of the ripple effect between literature, art, and music within a surrounding culture, a specific example being the many thematic, narrative, kinetic, and dynamic resonances between devilish dancing and Adventure. We argue that the web of metaphors supporting Adventure connects a semantic field composed of Death as dancer, trickster, or fool; an animate corpse or skeleton as dancer, musician, or fool; dancers as fools; and the Devil or shape-shifter as trickster, dancer, musician, or fool.2 In the middle of this overlapping field sits the Devil's counterpart: a crafty seductress. Different permutations of these elements recur in the iconography of the Dance of Death. Death touches skin or clothing or grasps the hands of the living, who then follow him, often with manic steps. Variations of Death and his helpers include skeletons, naked animate corpses, and dancing devils as jesters and musicians. They often seize and maneuver victims, leading a chain or haphazard ring of dancers. The Devil as trickster frequently makes a pact with the living. Likewise, the devilish female seducer metamorphoses into many guises and primarily tempts men. In Christian mythology she stems from Eve. She constitutes one of the many representations of strong women that can be found in Hoffmann's fiction in general and in his fairy tales in particular (Scullion and Treby 2-4). Reprinted with the permission of Wayne University Press
Hatless and coatless, the Traveling Enthusiast, the main narrator of E. T. A. Hoffmann's literary fairy tale "A New Year's Eve Adventure" shuttlecocks his way from a celebration party to a beer ...cellar and then to the Golden Eagle Inn, where he spends the night because his house key is in the pocket of his abandoned coat. Taking Zipes's premise that "the aesthetic arrangement and structure of the tales fairy tales in general were derived from the way the narrator or narrators perceived the possibility for resolution of social conflicts and contradictions or felt change was necessary" (Fairy Tales, 7), we can then say that "Adventure" mediates contemporary cultural anxieties concerning the imminence of a postwar political power vacuum and uncertainty about ways forward.
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