Translated by Ritchie Robertson.
Hoffmann is among the greatest and most popular of the German Romantics. This edition selects those tales in which the real and the supernatural are brought into contact and conflict. Their humour is a result of the incongruity of supernatural beings at large in an ostentatiously everyday world. They include The Golden Pot, recognized as Hoffmann's masterpiece by himself and posterity; its spine-chilling companion tale. The Sandman, which Offenbach drew on for his opera Tales of Hoffmann, and which Freud examines in his essay 'The Uncanny'; two longer and more elaborate fantasies, set respectively in Germany and Italy; and the late story. My Cousin's Corner Window, which shows the powers of the imagination being applied to everyday urban life, and marks a transition in European literature generally from Romanticism to Realism.
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Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822), better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach's famous but fictional opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Hoffmann's stories were tremendously influential in the 19th century, and he is one of the key authors of the Romantic movement.
