This collection of essays addresses a very broad range of E. T. A. Hoffmann's most significant works, examining them through the lens of "transgression." Transgression bears relevance to Hoffmann's life and professions in three ways. First, his official career path was that of jurisprudence; he was active as a lawyer, a judge and eventually as one of the most important magistrates in Berlin. Second, his personal life was marked by numerous conflicts with political and social authorities. Seemingly no matter where he went, he experienced much chaos, grief and impoverishment in leading his always precarious existence. Third, his works explore characters and concepts beyond the boundaries of what was considered aesthetically acceptable. "Normal" bourgeois existence was often juxtaposed to the lives of criminals, sinners, and other deviants, both within the spaces of the known world as well as in supernatural realms. He, perhaps more than any other author of the German Romantic movement, regularly portrayed the dark side of existence in his works, including unconscious psychological phenomena, nightmares, somnambulism, vampirism, mesmerism, Doppelganger, and other forms of transgressive behavior. It is the intention of this volume to provide a new look at Hoffmann's very diverse body of work from numerous perspectives, stimulating interest in Hoffmann in English language audiences.

About the Author
Christopher R. Clason is Emeritus Professor of German at Oakland University. He is the editor of E. T. A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism (2018) and co-editor of Romantic Automata: Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms (2020), Romantic Rapports: New Essays on Romanticism Across the Disciplines (2017) and Literary and Poetic Representations of Work and Labor in Europe and Asia during the Romantic Era (2011).

Reviews
Reviews'This new resource is both enjoyable and thoroughly thought-provoking-and so is well worth consultation by faculty and students.'
Sean Williams, European Romantic Review
'Transgressive Romanticism engages its central spatial metaphor to make Hoffmann's complex potential as a protorealist clear: expertly attuned to the forms of life and literature with which he was familiar, while always ready to subvert and think beyond them.'
Polly Dickson, German Studies Review



Book Information
ISBN 9781800856677
Author Christopher R. Clason
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press