E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Gräßliche Geschichte" by Jürgen Barkhoff

I think this is a presentation of an article wrote by J. Barkhoff and it`s about Hoffmann`s short novel "Vampirismus"


Women vampires, victimhood and vengeance: E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Gräßliche Geschichte"

by Jürgen Barkhoff, Senior Lecturer in German, Trinity College Dublin



"Famous vampires from Byron and Polidori to Bram Stoker typically represent a very masculine, phallic sexuality. When, however, the vampire entered the German literary scene around 1800, the undead changed gender and appeared predominantly as threatening and aggressive, but equally threatened and traumatised female figures. Texts like Goethe's ballad Die Braut von Korinth (1797) and Hoffmann's tale [Vampirismus] "Gräßliche Geschichte" (1820) position the liminal figure of the destructive, deadly female clearly within gendered discourses of religion, power, sexuality, the body and the family. The latter text also establishes numerous links to the gendered anthropology of mesmerist aura-vampirism in theory and literature. Overall these texts present a multi-facetted dialectic between victimhood and vengance which the paper seeks to analyze in its psychological and aesthetic dimensions."