SOURCE: "Scientific Portraits in Magical Frames: The Construction of Preternatural Narrative in the Work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Arthur Machen," Extrapolation, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 186-200.

Hoffmann's tale Der Automate and Arthur Machen's The Three Imposters seem firmly footed in the world of nineteenth-century romanticism. On these foundations the elements of the fantastic, or the supernatural, work within the narratives by the invocation of what Viktor Shklovsky termed [in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge, 1988] the technique of "estrangement" (ostranenie); defamiliarizing the commonplace by placing the everyday in parallel with this supernatural "otherness." [According to Colin Manlove, in Modern Fantasy, 1975] theories of fantasy literature reinforce this interpretation by suggesting that magical supernature in such fictions is "of another order of reality from that in which we exist and form our notions of possibility." This study will attempt to show that both Hoffmann's...