E.T.A. Hoffmann and Alcohol. Biography, Reception and Art

Throughout critical debates on E.T.A. Hoffmann, discussions of alcohol, andin particular its influence on and significance within E.T.A.

Hoffmann'screative output, have been recurrent, impassioned and frequently divisive. Portrayals of the artist as tortured alcoholic, such as one finds inOffenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann, continue to capture the publicimagination, but have fallen out of favour with critics wishing to bolsterHoffmann's status as a landmark writer.

Victoria Dutchman-Smith uses the specific fate of alcohol as a topic inliterature, biography and criticism as a prompt for the re-evaluation ofHoffmann's changing identities over the past two centuries: as artist, critic,Romantic, pre-emptive modernist, canonised great and, not least, as drinker. The role of alcohol in Hoffmann's life and works cannot be separated from widercultural and critical narratives, and Dutchman-Smith's enthusiastic explorationof these sheds dramatic new light on the use and abuse of categorisation, notjust in past and present responses to Hoffmann's works, but in the verystructures of literary debate.