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E. T. A. Hoffmann and Alcohol: Biography, Reception and Art. By Victoria Dutchman-Smith. London: Maney Publishing, 2010. Pp. ix + 186. Cloth $82.00. ISBN 978-1906540234.
Anyone who knows the German Romantic author E. T. A. Hoffmann solely from his depiction in the Offenbach opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann will be excused for viewing him as the producer of drunken fantasies. Even those who have read some of his most bizarre narratives, such as the early masterpiece Der goldne Topf (1814), may be pardoned for wondering whether in writing them he may have been under the influence of one mind-altering substance or another. In this study, Victoria Dutchman-Smith is not out to challenge that perception, as most all scholarly critics have done, but rather to investigate how his well-known and self-proclaimed-even self-depicted-indulgence in much drinking affected how critics from his day forward judged him as an artist and person, and how those judgments reflected...