The Anxiety of Gothic Kinship: Generic and Aesthetic Heterogeneity in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Novel The Devil’s Elixirs

Abstract

In this paper I trace aesthetic and cultural-historical interactions between phenomena of the British Gothic literature and German Dark Romanticism in terms of cultural transfer. Focus of the study is the analysis of E. T. A. Hoffman’s novel The Devil’s Elixirs juxtaposed to Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk. Works by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Friedrich Schiller, Carl Grosse, and others outline their Gothic context. The analysis traces the interplay of the verbal, the fantastic and the visual codes in the two novels and their synaesthetic interlocking, characteristic of the German author. The comparison includes characters and plot, intertextual, generic, ethical, and other aspects in Hoffmann’s and Lewis’s novels. Along with the Gothic, elements of the Bildungsroman and the Trivialroman are highlighted in The Elixirs. Also the motive of the double and instances of metafiction are analyzed in it. Critical works by E. Blackall, L. Doležel, R. Godal, M. Foucault, T. Todorov, and others were applied in my writing.