Безпокойството на родството – Е. Т. А. Хофман и контекстът на британската литературна готика
The Anxiety of Gothic Kinship: Generic and Aesthetic Heterogeneity in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Novel The Devil’s Elixirs

Author(s): Ognyan Kovachev
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Fiction, Studies of Literature, Novel, German Literature, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Национално издателство за образование и наука „Аз-буки“
Keywords: Gothic Literature; Dark Romanticism; Doppelgänger; Supernatural; Fantastic; Visual Code; Intertextuality; Metafiction
Summary/Abstract: In this paper I trace aesthetic and cultural-historical interactions between British Gothic literature and German black Romanticism phenomena in terms of cultural transfer. Focus of the study is the analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel The Devil’s Elixirs and its comparison with 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 work of the verbal, fantastic and visual code in the two novels and their synaesthetic interlocking, characteristic of the German author. The comparison is made on the levels of character, plot, intertext, genre, ethics, etc. Along with the Gothic, in The Elixirs I highlight elements of the Bildungsroman and the Trivialroman. Also the motive of the double and instances of metafiction are analyzed in it. In the course of writing, works by E. Blackall, L. Doležel, R. Godal, M. Foucault, T. Todorov, and others were applied.

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