This diploma thesis deals with the basic principles of Georg Buquoy's (1781-1851) philosophy, which were presented in his unpublished treatise Kern meiner philosophischen Grundansicht. Buquoy's ideas are interpreted in the context of contemporary scientific discourse in the Czech lands. Attention is also drawn to Buquoy's foreign inspiration sources. The explication of Buquoy's ideas is based on the theory of intellectual history, with special focus on the interrelationship between natural sciences and humanities and the esotericism of the late 18th and the first half of the 19th century.

The aim of the essay is to investigate how the historical societal context is presented in curricula and textbooks. The studied material consists of the curricula Lpf 94 and Gy 11, and four textbooks on literature intended for teaching the subject of Swedish in upper secondary school. The literary eras that are studied are the Enlightenment and the Romantic period. The study of the textbooks proceeds from the analytical schema of the historian Niklas Ammert. Theories of literary and social conceptual worlds are applied to analyse the textbooks and a curriculum-theory perspective is used to analyse the steering documents.     The analysis shows that there is a greater focus on the relationship between literature and societal development in Gy 11 and that there are stricter learning requirements. One difference between the textbooks is the approach they have chosen to get at the historical societal context. Den levande litteraturen and Texter och tankar från antiken till 1900 do this chiefly through a type of presentation that uses explanations and sometimes simple statements of fact. Svenska impulser 2 establishes connections with the present day in a reflective way. Människans texter – litteraturen gives the biggest allround picture based on different societal contexts. This textbook is also the one that most clearly corresponds to the current subject plans for teaching Swedish.

The submitted doctoral thesis examines the function and performance of the motive of a snake in four selected texts about artists of the German romantic period and perceives the snake as an attribute reflecting the problems of the artistic existence and a way to the artistic work, possibly of the artistic work at all. When interpreting the single motives of the snake, three-phase procedure as applied by Erwin Panofsky in description of the motives in the pictures has been chosen by analogy for literary texts. The interpretation is based on the structural position of the motive of the snake in the text and its performance in the text. Subsequently, the principal role is revelation of contexts which updates the given motive of the snake - in particular they are biblical snakes, mythical snakes and a serpentine line as a line of beauty which was the subject of the period aesthetic discourse. The meaning of the motive of the snake in the texts is given primarily by the mutual interaction of theme contexts which is in the single texts realized by various ways. The motive of the snake as formed in the single interpreted texts is a highly complex motive in all the cases. Thanks to the possibility of connotation with the snakes from the sphere of the Bible and mythology the literary motive of the snake becomes a...