In mediaeval times Venice merely meant to the Northerner a great and wealthy commercial power aid a very cunning and crafty enemy. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the rise of Humanism brought about a change in the German attitude towards Venice. The most beautiful editions of the Greek and Latin classics were printed by Aldo Manuccio in Venice, so that, for the German scholar at least, Venice began to embody one ideal, that of the city of origin of beautiful books. From this period onwards there is a growth in the symbolic value of Italy, and of Venice in. particular, for the Northerner. During the seventeenth century Italian literature became the symbol for the highest possible achievement in this field, With Mignon's songs in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister there begins the more abstract and intangible symbolic value of Venice as the land of complete happiness. For the Romantics Italy was the land of the Kunstlerreise, The German artist had too cold a nature to produce great works of art until he was thawed by the sensuous South.

This thesis analyses the depiction and its function of politically active women in novels by six female authors from the margins of the democratic revolution of 1848 and the first German women’s movement. The thesis asks (i) what their political stance was in relation to democratic developments and women’s rights, (ii) how they rendered their political convictions into literary form, (iii) which literary images they used, criticised, or invented in order to depict politically active women in their novels in a positive light, and (iv) which narrative strategies they employed to ‘smuggle’ politically and socially radical ideas into what were sometimes only ostensibly conventional plots. The thesis combines intertextual analysis with poetic analyses of individual texts in order to highlight deviant elements in narrative strategy, imagery, or text-internal appraisals by the narrator or author. In order to contextualise the chosen texts as well as my analyses, it draws on the historical environment (social and legal developments, revolutions, technological progress) for the definition of what can be considered radical and political in the period 1845-1919. Additionally, the thesis is firmly grounded in feminist theory, which provides the instruments for highlighting the concepts and circumstances in which the six authors’ works are situated. The essays and novels analysed were written before feminist theory was established; however, their proto-feminist observations, demands, and discursive tactics contributed much to the formation and institutionalisation of feminist thought and, ultimately, theory. In their efforts to construct a positive role model for the political woman, the six authors chosen are united in their notion that such a role model should evolve from bourgeois values of family and work ethics, but the examples manifested in their novels show a great variety of degrees of radicalism.