E.T.A. Hoffman's wildly original fictions are some of the most unusual examples of German Romanticism's dark passions, and the stories in Tales of Hoffman are selected and translated from the German with an introduction by R.J. Hollingdale in Penguin Classics. This selection of Hoffmann's finest short stories vividly demonstrates his intense imagination and preoccupation with the supernatural, placing him at the forefront of both surrealism and the modern horror genre. Suspense dominates tales such as Mademoiselle de Scudery, in which an apprentice goldsmith and a female novelist find themselves caught up in a series of jewel thefts and murders. In the sinister The Sandman, famously used by Sigmund Freud to illustrate both his concept of the unheimlich, or 'uncanny', and of Oedipal guilt, a young man's sanity is tormented by fears about a mysterious chemist; while in The...
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