Overview

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, as well as a jurist, composer, music critic, and artist. From 1816 to 1817, he published Night Pieces, a collection of eight stories in two volumes. Largely ignored upon release, several tales later drew significant analysis, with ""The Sandman"" emerging as Hoffmann's most enduring work. A delirious tale of shattered vision and spiritual dismemberment, the uncanny here is no mere trick of perception - it is the collapse of reality itself. Nathaniel, a doomed romantic gripped by childhood trauma, is haunted by Coppelius, a spectral optician whose instruments of precision conceal a deeper violence. Eyes are plucked, souls distorted, and love reduced to clockwork. At the story's center stands Olympia - silent, radiant, and impossibly still. ""The Sandman"" is a fever dream of Enlightenment gone sour, where the boundaries between soul and mechanism, memory and madness, blur beyond recognition. It mocks the rational mind and exalts the terror of childhood fears made incarnate.

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Reviews

""E.T.A. Hoffmann's fantastic burlesque and profound poetic power have conquered the world."" -The New York Times Book Review ""'The Sandman' is a carefully structured study of developing insanity that reveals Hoffmann's deep interest in psychology."" -E.F. Bleiler, Supernatural Fiction Writers ""Hoffmann's figures are, to him at least, absolutely real . . . In his stories he hovers always on the boundary between real and the supernatural, crossing and recrossing at will . . . one realm was as real to him as the other."" -Palmer Cobb, ""Poe and Hoffmann"" ""'The Sandman' is the prime object of analysis in Freud's most important discussion of the fantastic, The Uncanny (1919)."" -Eric S. Rabkin, Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind ""Hoffmann was profoundly interested in the philosophers who were forebears of Jungian thought - Kant, Schelling, and G.H. von Schubert, to name the most important . . . Like Schelling and Schubert, Hoffmann believed that the unconscious was a person's link to cosmic forces, if only her or she could understand its language."" -Joseph Andriano, Our Ladies of Darkness ""A story like 'The Sandman' is true, it gives literary shape to insights which cannot be conveyed in any way less grotesque, absurd, and uncanny."" -S.S. Prawer, Hoffmann's Uncanny Guest ""E.T.A. Hoffmann, it will by now have been noticed, is by any standards a key figure in the development of the literary fantastic."" -Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic ""'The Sandman' brings to the fore the power of vision . . . and deserve[s] to be better placed in the critical history of science fiction."" -Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines ""Hoffmann's writing nearly always creates a sense of boundaries breaking down, of spiritual vertigo."" -Michael Dirda, Classics for Pleasure

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