On Genealogy: Biology, Religion, and Aesthetics in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16) and Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia (1794-96)

The first scientific works that describe corporeal and mental qualities as the result of hereditary transmission appeared around 1800. While the Enlightenment had assumed or posited a potentially free self, new findings in medicine and biology indicated an inherited burden which determines the individual. Reading E. T.A. Hoffmann's Elixiere des Teufels in the context of Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia, this paper suggests the necessity of opening a new dimension of the discourse on the novel by highlighting the significance of the heredity debate in the life sciences for both the novel's definition of the individual and the novel's self-understanding. The paper argues that Hoffmann questions the empirically justified truth claim of the emerging scientific disciplines and rejects attempts to apply biological models to human psychological and moral behavior.E.T.A. Hoffmann's Elixiere are presented as a key moment in the formation of the novel as that area of the modern world which functions as a meta-critical space for the sciences.