The Romantic Context of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fairy Tales, The Golden Pot, The Strange Child and The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

As diaries, letters and the intensive intertextuality of his prose fiction show, the German Romantic writer and composer, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), was an obsessive bibliophile and polymath. The aim of this article is to explore how far three of his literary fairy tales, The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairy Tale (1814), The Strange Child (1816) and The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), use the generic conventions of the fairy tale, and how far they are influenced by his voracious reading, his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature, and his engagement with contemporary debates. We conclude with brief observations about his literary legacy in the genres of fairy tales and fantasy fiction.