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Carmen Sylva (1843-1916), a German princess and the first Queen of Romania, was a well-known royal figure and a prolific writer. Under this pseudonym, she published around fifty volumes in a wide variety of genres, including poetry, short stories and aphorisms. During her lifetime she was a regular feature in the British periodical press and visited Britain on numerous occasions. Widely reviewed – both celebrated and condemned for her ‘fatal fluency’ – Sylva’s work became marginalised after her death and has yet to be fully recovered. She has only recently received critical attention in her native Germany and has yet to be recuperated within British literary culture. This thesis will examine the reasons behind Sylva’s current obscurity as well as presenting the grounds for her reassessment. It will establish her connection to Britain, markers of which can still be found in its regional geography, as well as the scope of her literary presence in British periodicals. It will draw comparisons between Sylva and her contemporaries and will examine her contribution to fin-de-siècle British literary culture, analysing her short stories in order to detail her engagement with the ‘Woman Question’. This focus places Sylva at the centre of contemporary discussions and her often conflicting responses to such issues further our understanding of the complexity of nineteenth-century literary debates. In reassessing Sylva, this study will address broader notions surrounding the short story, popular fiction, and women’s writing, in order to question both current and contemporary attitudes to literature.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine in the fictional works of Theodor Fontane, the ironic realist, those elements which may be appropriately termed supernatural or irrational. While noting these elements, previous studies have usually singled out individual themes or motifs in selected works. This is an attempt to examine in detail the full range of such irrational material which, at first sight, would seem incongruous and alien in the context of novels celebrated for their representation of social reality. The central supernatural motifs under consideration are ghosts and fairy-tales; irrational concepts examined include fate and predestination, with the attendant themes of grace, prophecy, premonition and omen, together with the closely allied concepts of superstition and religion, and the motif of the character with elemental affinities. A more or less chronological approach has been adopted, in order to bring out the progression or development in the employment of the material; although the novels have, on occasion, been arranged in groups (Chapters IV-VII) in order to facilitate a comparative study, The section on the fictional works is preceded by an examination of the Wanderunven durch die Mark Brandenburg and autobiographical works, as possible sources of supernatural and irrational motifs and themes. The study reveals a complex range of functions performed by the elements under examination, and a degree of progression can be discerned. Broadly speaking, irrational and supernatural material is presented indirectly in the novels, through the perception or utterances of the characters, and the references become more oblique in the later novels. The irrational material can be seen, in many cases, to be fundamental to the structural development of the work in question, and whereas in earlier works the irrationally contrived structure is often obtrusive, in later novels, such as Effi Briest, the integration of these elements with more realistic aspects of motivation and structure is complete. Supernatural elements which appear in Vor dem Sturm (Chapter III) and the crime stories (Chapter IV) as directly experienced phenomena recur in the early social novels (Chapter V) solely in conversational contexts. Supernatural references scarcely figure in the later Berlin novels (Chapter VI), which explore social themes other than marital discord. They re-emerge, however, in Unwiederbringlich and Effi Briest (Chapter VII), where disharmony in marriage is again a central theme. Fairy tale imagery, at first invoked to symbolise ideal or alluring feminine qualities, later serves to deny the validity of the idyll in modern life. In Der Stechlin (Chapter VIII), where the majority of irrational and supernatural elements recur in a conciliatory and reflective context, their conventional functions have been largely superseded, but their continued presence confirms that they are essential features of Fontane's expressive diction, and it is in his final novel that the elemental figure finds her most developed and enigmatic form, in Melusine. The consideration of irrational and supernatural features in the works has resulted in an examination of any of the central themes and distinctive stylistic qualities of Fontane's fictional writing: a fact which clearly indicates the significance of such features as integral, indeed fundamental, aspects of his art.

Elfriede Jelinek is one of the few German-speaking contemporary authors who have attracted intense attention of both critics and scholars while being alive. After the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 even more analyses on her works have been published. In spite of her apparent presence in the public realm, critics tend to read her works as "authorless" texts, in which the narrative voices merge and make it impossible to discern either personal or authorial voices. The author's concern with post-modern and poststructuralist theories such as Roland Barthes' have reinforced the tendency to marginalize the topic of authorship in Jelinek scholarship. This thesis aims to analyse authorial voices and motives in Jelinek's prose texts Lust, Gier and Neid and to contextualize them with the images of the author that were produced outside the texts, namely in the media and in literary criticism. I would thereby like to demonstrate that these figurations form an important connection between text and context and help provide an insight into central motifs of Jelinek's works. The abovementioned novels are suitable for such an analysis, as they help establish a line of development of the authorship motif throughout the three decades of Jelinek's literary production. Furthermore, this analysis closes an existing gap in research on Jelinek as there exists no study that compares the three novels. The novel Gier has so far mostly been ignored by research and there are very few studies on the online project Neid. Dealing with prose texts instead of plays has the advantage of being able to highlight the function of the narrative comment that has developed into an authorial voice over time. The purpose of this study is neither the revision of the existence of the criticism of the notions of the author or the subject within the texts nor shall it be to establish a biographical link between aesthetics and author. The idea is to show that Jelinek considers the relationship between life and literature, between author and public as essential mechanisms of power. These cannot just be annihilated through criticising them, or by declaring the author as irrelevant. Jelinek's reflections on authorship are based on a cultural critique that deals with the conceptualisation of bourgeois subjectivity and thereafter with the notion of the authorial discourse. Jelinek's authorial criticism draws on Foucault's theoretical writings on the social and historical genesis of the notion of authorship that he has coined in the term 'author-function'. Questioning the instance of the speaker, Jelinek simultaneously reflects on the conditions and strategies of authorization of who is speaking. Jelinek's literary self-reflections speak of an authorial self-understanding that could be seen as a derivative form of engaged writing stemming from a reading of Adorno's Negative Dialectics. Drawing on Adorno, Jelinek develops a negative aesthetics that influences her authorial concept. She does not aim to develop an aesthetics suggesting a positive form of seemingly free engaged writing, but a mise-en-scène of the paradoxical constitution of authorship in modern capitalism.

The present thesis operates within the framework of a macro-structural and descriptive approach to Translation Studies, examining aspects of a type of literature that has traditionally been marginalized within the polysystem, namely oral narrative. The thesis investigates translation as one element in a larger, interactive system; it does not regard 'translation' only in its traditional function as a linguistic act between two different national languages, but one that includes a conception of translation between two variants of one language. The case study in question is a nineteenth-century collection of Norwegian folktales Norske Folkeeventyr, collected and retold by P. Chr. Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, first published in 1841. This publication came to have a considerable linguistic and literary impact on the Norwegian polysystem. The thesis aims to show how macro-structural factors governed the creation of the corpus through 'translation' from oral to literary mode, and from diverse dialects to a standardized language, and how the resulting product had a significant impact on the standardization of the one of the emerging Norwegian language forms. The thesis seeks to describe in detail which historical, political, literary and linguistic factors, in the national as well as supra-national framework, have affected this process of translation and text-production as a whole. It further aims to demonstrate how this process took shape in the context of, and indeed how it was instrumental in the shaping of, an emerging Norwegian national identity after the country's independence from Denmark (1814) and Sweden (1905). The thesis thus illustrates, through detailed description, how a specific corpus of texts has been formed in a dialectic process with the readership and the target culture, both adapting to and influencing prevailing literary and linguistic norms.