Throughout critical debates on E.T.A. Hoffmann, discussions of alcohol, and in particular its influence on and significance within E.T.A. Hoffmann’s creative output, have been recurrent, impassioned and frequently divisive. Portrayals of the artist as tortured alcoholic, such as one finds in Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffmann, continue to capture the public imagination, but have fallen out of favour with critics wishing to bolster Hoffmann’s status as a landmark writer.

Victoria Dutchman-Smith uses the specific fate of alcohol as a topic in literature, biography and criticism as a prompt for the re-evaluation of Hoffmann’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 wider cultural and critical narratives, and Dutchman-Smith’s enthusiastic exploration of these sheds dramatic new light on the use and abuse of categorisation, not just in past and present responses to Hoffmann’s works, but in the very structures of literary debate.

About the author

Victoria Dutchman-Smith

Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) was one of the most radical and sophisticated critics of the German Enlightenment. The three late works Konxompax, Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft and Golgatha und Scheblimini!, written between 1779 and 1784, are polemics against iconic texts by the Enlightenment luminaries Lessing, Kant and Mendelssohn. This diverse and rich material, ranging from the Fragmentenstreitto Kant’s first Critique, is refracted through Hamann’s radical Lutheranism, with freemasonry and the pagan mystery religions adding lurid apocalyptic highlights. Hamann’s idiosyncratic style and heavily intertextual manner of composition give his works a fascinating and teasing complexity and put his writing at odds with the period’s preferred ideals of ease and elegance. For these reasons, he is a standing provocation to our assumptions about the 18th century.

About the author

Timothy Beech

After his death in 1768, the famous novelist Laurence Sterne did not rest undisturbed in his grave. While rumours of the theft and dissection of Sterne’s corpse circulated in the anatomy schools, numerous writers took possession of his literary body of work. New forms of Sternean entertainment were produced by literary mimics who impersonated the author through the medium of print, impersonations which included startling and unique interpretations of Sterne’s character and fiction.

Warren Oakley introduces two new critical concepts to eighteenth-century literary study, ‘bodysnatching’ and ‘mimicry’, to understand these texts that have been neglected and overlooked in Sterne studies. This lucid account reveals the personal stories of such literary mimics, the creative techniques they employed and the consequences of their actions upon the posthumous perception of Sterne, the man and his ‘cadaverous goods’.

About the author

Warren L Oakley is a Postdoctoral Tutor at the School of English, University of Leeds.

About this book

Narcisse Berchère was commissioned by Ferdinand de Lesseps to make a visual record of the first phase of the construction of the Suez Canal. To this end, he spent five months in the Isthmus, from November 1861 to March 1862. He is said, by his first biographer, Bernard Prost to have completed an ‘album’, containing 68 plans, drawings and watercolours.

This ‘album’ was given by Berchère to Ferdinand de Lesseps, who then presented it to Emperor Napoleon III, via the Duc de Bassano. It was held at the Palais des Tuileries in Paris, where it is believed to have perished, when the Palace was burned down in 1871, at the time of the Commune.

Fortunately, Narcisse Berchère also gave a verbal account of his experiences in a book, published by Jules Hetzel in 1863, Le Désert de Suez: cinq mois dans l’Isthme, of which this is the first new edition.

Connu surtout comme peintre orientaliste, Narcisse Berchère fut commandité par Ferdinand de Lesseps pour apporter un témoignage visuel de la première phase de la construction du canal de Suez. Au cours de sa mission, il passa cinq mois dans l’isthme de Suez en 1861 et 1862, et exécuta un album de 68 plans, dessins et aquarelles, qu’il remit à Lesseps, lequel l’offrit ensuite à l’empereur Napoléon III. Cet album aurait été détruit dans l’incendie du palais des Tuileries, sous la Commune en 1871. Heureusement, Berchère fit également de son séjour un témoignage écrit, dont le texte publié constitue la première réédition.

About the author

Professor Wright is Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin.

About this book

Combat is one of the central themes of Middle High German narrative literature, and of significant interest to medievalists in general. Nevertheless, few studies to date have attempted a detailed analysis of the depiction of combat in literary texts. Rachel Kellett uses an inclusive approach to the details of combat descriptions in order to analyse minutely the scenes of single combat and battle presented in two major narrative works by Der Stricker, the epic Karl der Große and the Arthurian romance Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal, written between 1220 and 1250. The author compares these works with a wide range of other texts, both French and German, and investigates the relationship between Stricker’s depiction of combat and that found in the works of Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach among others. She also draws on historical research into medieval warfare, tournament and the tradition of the judicial combat, which adds valuable depth to her analysis of literary texts. Overall, this study provides new insights into the depiction of combat in Middle High German literature as a whole, while at the same time highlighting hitherto unnoticed aspects of the writings of Der Stricker as an individual author, and bringing a new perspective on the ambiguous role played by combat in the equally ambiguous Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal.

About the author

Rachel E. Kellett

Building on recent investigations into affinities between early German Romanticism and French post-structuralism, this study brings together the work of Jacques Derrida with the writings of one of early Romanticism’s most important theorists, Frie

drich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), better known as Novalis. In contrast to recent criticism, which traces the historical path from Romanticism to modern theory in broad strokes, this book undertakes comparative readings of Novalis’ and Derrida’s texts on literature and philosophy. The book focuses on the significance both writers accord to paradox and argues that readings which are attuned to paradox can better appreciate the proximity of Romanticism and post- structuralism. As well as their affirmation of paradox, the texts of Novalis and Derrida testify to a profound respect for the Other, and the close readings of selected texts reveal remarkable similarities in their thinking on literature, philosophy and representation, and on the intricate interrelation between language, identity and desire.

About the author

Clare Kennedy

The turn of the twentieth century was a time of identity crisis for the upper and middle classes, one in which increased social mobility caused the blurring of traditional boundaries and created a

need for reference works such as the British Who’s Who (1897). At the same time, the rise of a new leisure industry and an increase in international travel led to a boom period for confidence men, who frequently operated in hotels and holiday resorts. Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, written between 1910-13 and continued (though never completed) in 1951-54, uses contemporary accounts of these figures as a starting-point from which to explore the aesthetics of society. The early Krull marks an important stage in Mann’s development in a number of respects. In writing it, Mann acquired a more flexible conception of identity and a new understanding of the relation between artist and public. Krull also signals a deeper engagement with Goethe and a shift in Mann’s work towards a more open treatment of sexuality. The novel presents art as being central to the development of the individual and to social interaction. While Krull is nominally a confidence man, he is more of a performance artist, a purveyor of beauty who relies upon the complicity of his aud

ience. The later Krull takes up where Mann left off and continues the justification of art as an essential human activity. This study draws upon unpublished material in order to provide a comprehensive reading of Felix Krull. It examines the novel within the context of Mann’s work as a whole, and, in doing so, it seeks to demonstrate the remarkable continuity of Mann’s creative achievement.

About the author

Ernest Schonfield teaches German language and literature at Oxford University, Kings College London and UCL.

‘Beyond Écriture féminine’ is the first book to be published exploring the work of the contemporary French author Jeanne Hyvrard (1945- ) from her early novels of the 1970s to more rec

ent texts of the 1990s and beyond. Moving critical accounts of Hyvrard beyond a focus upon écriture féminine, it identifies the patterns through which her writing repeats and transforms creation mythology, her own oeuvre, and her own life, examining how intertextual repetitions bind her work together into a complex and ever-expanding web of allusions and resonances which engages the reader in a process of constant re-interpretation, challenging notions of linearity and reflecting the ‘chaotic’ reality of life in the Hyvrardian world.

About the author

Cathy Helen Wardle

Following her conversion to Catholicism in 1926, Gertrud von le Fort (1876–1971) developed literary forms in her fiction and verse that sought to allow readers imaginative access to her sacramental vision of reality. Le Fort’s contribution to German literature has often been identified narrowly with the Christian inner emigration during the Third Reich. This study’s concentrationon the period 1924–46 extends the critical perspective towards a more nuanced assessment of her work that pays appropriate attention to the literary, theological, and socio-cultural context of German Catholicism in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Scholars have considered, but by no means discussed exhaustively, whether a German literary renouveau catholique emerged in the first half of the twentieth century akin to that witnessed slightly earlier in France. This study demonstrates that le Fort’s work does indeed belong to a flourishing period of Catholic culture in Germany, but one fraught with the complexities of the national culture out of which it emerged. The three main thematic and chronologically arranged parts of the study address, respectively, the importance of religious conversion in le Fort’s work; her problematic sense of German and Catholic identity in the years immediately before the establishing of the Third Reich; and, lastly, her literary inner emigration and response to National Socialism. Throughout the study, the term ‘sacramental realism’ is used to aid a new evaluation of the interdependence of theology and aesthetics that underlies le Fort’s literary work. This study presents a revised approach to a significant, but often misconstrued, area of Catholic literature during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich.

About the author

Helena M. Tomko

Also published for the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies School of Advanced Study, University of London.

“…engagingly presented… a serious contribution to Roth scholarship.” Austrian Studies, Vol 15 (2007)

This is the first monograph on the work of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) to be published in English by a British-based academic, and should prove useful both to those with a specialized interest in Roth, whose novels and journalism continue to gain admirers around the world, and to those interested more broadly in an extraordinarily rich period in twentieth century European culture. It serves both as an introduction to the early part of a body of work whose variety and volume were for many years overshadowed by the reputation of the historical novel Radetzkymarsch (1932), and as a re-assessment of Roth’s writing, both of fiction and of journalism, within the modern tradition. A perceived fragmentation of social, political,cultural and other traditions was a particular concern for Roth, as for many contemporaries, and the thematic chapters present a detailed contextual survey of Roth’s intense and often ambivalent engagement with aspects of modern life, including travel, gender, technology, the city, and cinema. Besides assessing the continuities and discontinuities in Roth’s attitudes, these chapters examine how his responses to the contemporary world impact upon both the form and content of his writing. The author argues that Roth’s writing of the 1920s should be considered modernist not just in its often prescient sensitivity to cultural and political developments, but in its employment of a formal aesthetics and narrative self-consciousness which eventually made possible the illusory wholeness of the later fiction.

About the author

Jon Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in German. He has been a Research Officer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies in Sussex and a Lecturer in German at King’s College London. He then joined Royal Holloway in 2003.