This master thesis presents the character of Job and his reception in German-speaking literature on the basis of three works of the twentieth century, written by Joseph Roth, Oskar Kokoschka and Günter Kunert. The starting point for the literary reception is the biblical Old Testament book Job, whose story, form and circumstances of origin are mentioned in the first part of the work. Following are the performances of individual authors and the interpretation of their works. The core of the work is a comparison of literary reception of the figure of Job in the texts with a biblical original. The subject of the study was, in particular, the question of how the selected authors deal with the biblical substance, how they use Job for their works and which meaning have the comic elements in their texts.

I examine Wilde’s Hellenism in terms of the specific texts, editions and institutions through which he encountered ancient Greece. The late-nineteenth-century professionalisation of classical scholarship and the rise of the new science of archaeology from the 1870s onwards endangered the status of antiquity as a textual source of ideal fictions rather than a material object of positivist study. The major theme of my thesis is Wilde’s relationship with archaeology and his efforts to preserve Greece as an imaginative resource and a model for right conduct. From his childhood Wilde had accompanied his father Sir William Wilde on digs around Ireland. Sir William’s ethnological interests led him to posit a common racial origin for Celts and Greeks; thus, for Wilde, to read a Greek text was to intuit native affinity. Chapters 1–3 trace his education, his travels in Greece, his involvement with the founding of the Hellenic Society, and his defence of the archaeologically accurate stage spectaculars of the 1880s, arguing that in his close association with supporters of archaeology such as J.P. Mahaffy and George Macmillan Wilde exemplifies the new kind of Hellenist opposed by Benjamin Jowett and R.C. Jebb. Chapter 4 makes a case for Wilde’s final repudiation of archaeology and his return to the textual remains of Greek antiquity, present as an intertexual resource in his mature works. Thus I examine the role of Aristotle’s Ethics in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and of Platonism in the critical dialogues, The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ I present The Importance of Being Earnest as a self-conscious exercise in the New Comedy of Menander, concluding that Wilde ultimately returned to the anachronistic eclecticism of the Renaissance attitude to ancient texts.

During the research project "The situation of literary translation in Czech society after 1945", which was initiated by the Institute of Translation studies of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and undertaken between 2008 and 2011, nearly thirty interviews were conducted with important Czech translators of the post-war generation. This thesis follows the cited research project. It is divided into three parts. The first part presents an introduction to the methods of oral history. The second part confronts objective historical facts with subjective memory - information obtained through the conducted interviews. The third part expands the corpus with two further sets of interviews. These are introduced by a short depiction of the presented narrators and followed by an editorial note. In the summary the paper points out and evaluates the results gained by the present research, including the newly collected material.

Handreichung für Lehrer der Sekundarstufe II zur Einführung in das Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten (mit Materialien). Grundlage der Handreichung ist ein interdisziplinäres Projekt, das sich mit der Rezeption des Mittelalters in der Stadt Chemnitz auseinandergesetzt hat. In diesem Rahmen sind Komplexe Lernleistungen und Besondere Lernleistungen entstanden.

This thesis defines ‘classical lyricism’ as any mode of appropriation of Greek and Latin monodic lyric whereby a poet may develop a wider discourse on poetry. Assuming classical lyricism as an internal category of enquiry, my thesis investigates the presence of Sappho and Catullus as lyric archetypes in Italian and North American poetry of the 20th century. The analysis concentrates on translations and appropriations of Sappho and Catullus in four case studies: Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) in Italy; Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Anne Carson (b. 1950) in North America. I first trace the poetic reception of Sappho and Catullus in the oeuvres of the four authors separately. I define and evaluate the role of the respective appropriations within each author’s work and poetics. I then contextualise the four case studies within the Italian and North American literary histories. Finally, through the new outlook afforded by the comparative angle of this thesis, I uncover some of the hidden threads connecting the different types of classical lyricism transnationally. The thesis shows that the course of classical lyricism takes two opposite aesthetic directions in Italy and in North America. Moreover, despite the two aesthetic trajectories diverging, I demonstrate that the four poets’ appropriations of Sappho and Catullus share certain topical characteristics. Three out of four types of classical lyricism are defined by a preference for Sappho’s and Catullus’ lyrics which deal with marriage rituals and defloration, patterns of death and rebirth, and solar myths. They stand out as the epiphenomena of the poets’ interest in the anthropological foundations of the lyric, which is grounded in a philosophical function associated with poetry as a quest for knowledge. I therefore ultimately propose that ‘classical lyricism’ may be considered as an independent historical and interpretative category of the classical legacy.