E. T. A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism ed. by Christopher R. Clason (review)

Many readers may be familiar with the German author, music critic, composer, jurist, and painter E. T. A. Hoffmann, his two novels, or some of his four dozen short stories, in which the supernatural and the dark side of human existence loom just below the surface. Well-known is Hoffmann's eccentric alter ego Johannes Kreisler, as is his works' inspiration for later authors and composers. A wide range of approaches have been employed over the years to explicate Hoffmann's writings, from Freud's notion of the "uncanny" to interpretations of Hoffmann as a postmodernist avant la lettre. Yet avenues to further elucidate Hoffmann's enigmatic and multifaceted works are by no means exhausted, as this essay collection clearly demonstrates. "Transgression," the collection's common theme, indeed promises to be a fruitful one in light of Hoffmann's multiple professions and crossover influences in all the disparate fields he practiced. The volume's eleven case studies are dedicated to Hoffmann as literary author and discuss a selection of famous and less well-known tales from his collections Fantasiestücke (1814–15), Nachtstücke (1816–17), and Die Serapionsbrüder (1819–21); the fairy tales Prinzessin Brambilla (1820) and Meister Floh (1822); and Hoffmann's last novel, Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (1819, 1821). They utilize various theoretical approaches in exploring this broad spectrum of Hoffmann's literary oeuvre and are organized in four sections: Transgression against institutions, in the arts, in the Märchen, and in the reception of his novel Kater Murr. Recurring themes emerge across these sections as will be outlined below.

The two opening contributions are dedicated to laws, moral codes, sociability, and the nature of violence. Alexander Schlutz's analysis reveals how in Das Majorat (1817), the practice of primogeniture and the treatment of people as property lead to intrigue, crime, and ultimately the demise of an aristocratic family. Latent violence in customs, loss of social coherence, and commodification (here, of "priceless" jewelry) are also at the core of Peter Erickson's investigation of Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1820), a tale that similarly to Das Majorat reflects on societal and economic changes as a consequence of the transformation from a feudal society into the modern world. In this tale, gifting (whether as a present, expression of hospitality, or charity) becomes "Gift" (poison) in the German sense of the word, leading to legal and economic transgressions with fatal consequences.

Dehumanization is also the result of the perversion of science and scientists, as Paola Mayer explains in her contribution concluding the first section: Whether empirical approaches, as practiced by the opticians in Meister Floh and the builders of automata in Der Sandmann (1816), or Romantic science, which explores connections between body and mind as exemplified in Der Magnetiseur (1814), both lead to transgressions against nature and reveal a desire for power and possession rather than cognition. A critique of science, in this case the discourse of psychiatry, is also a central aspect in Nicole Sütterlin's reading of Vampirismus (1821), the closing contribution of the next section on transgression and the arts. According to Sütterlin, the tale furthermore reflects on its own poetics as well as the Lesewut-debate about the transgressive powers of literature which vampirically devours its own readers and authors. The objectification of human beings through mechanical-automatic science or dark powers features again in Christina Weiler's analysis of Das fremde Kind (1819), which opens the third section. The siblings in this fairy tale are subjected to the power struggle between their philistine tutor/demonic gnome and the fairy child but they manage to hold on to their playful imagination in the realm of dreams and, it is implied, through literature.

Two further contributions draw on Hannah Arendt's concepts of the interconnectedness of the private and the public realm. In Der goldne Topf (1814), Ruth Kellar sees the project of poiesis (the Romantic construction of unity between self and world) replaced...