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.