The New Woman described in short fiction and editorial articles in British periodicals not only presented the ideal New Woman to readers, but served to shape the perceptions of the reader depending on the demographic of the targeted reading audience for that specific periodical. The audience for specific British periodicals featuring the New Woman included conservative families whose youth saw the New Woman figure as a role model. The New Woman figure easily connected to readers, particularly young, female middle-class readers, who easily identified with her because she possessed similar socioeconomic characteristics. Just as there were many New Women characters in these periodicals experiencing triumph and turmoil, the real-life New Women reading these stories experienced similar trials and tribulations. Facing adversity, the New Women endeavored to shed a traditional domestic stereotype in British society in the periodicals whose audience was receptive to this progressive, yet still moderate figure.

In the end of the1940's Occupational Medicine was institutionalised in Sweden. Health hazilards in the work place was not a new field for the Swedish physicians. They had been preocrcupied with these problems for a long time. The aim of this thesis is to analyse and describe how health hazards in the work placees, ecpecially in the factories, were perceived and described by Swedish physicians at the turn of the 20t century. The aim is also to clarify the physicians' role m shaping, developing and supervising the Occupational Safety and Health Acts. The city of Norrköping is used as anexample in discussing how physicians at a local level paid attention to health and safety issues in the work place. According to the physicians, there were a number of harmful factors in the factory work that could endanger health, but these were also seen to be dependent on the worker. Workers ldisplayed different kinds of vulnerability to the harmful factors. Sex, heredity, age, health, physique, habits and behaviour were understood as determining components. The preventive measures not only contained guidelines for the factories. They also included advises on how '!the workers should organise and live their lives outside work. The life style and behaviour the physicians would like to encourage were aligned with the !cultural values of the bourgeoisie at the tum of the 20th century. It is vital to recognise the cultural lens through which the physicians perceived and spoke of the workers' situation, their way of life and their behaviour inside as well as outside the factory.

Mgr. Magdalena Kučerová Dissertation work: Myth of Narcissus in French literature at the turn of the 20th century ABSTRACT: This dissertation thesis based on knowledge of French myth criticism deals with the issue of myths in literature, which is a specific manifestation of human symbolic imagination. In its most general level the work studies the definition of a myth and its social function as well as the matter of opposite notions regarding to the mythos and logos, which have gradually more and more differentiated along with the development of European thinking. The myth of Narcissus has probably been one of the oldest myths in European culture. In its most renowned and most comprehensive form, the myth first appeared in the third book of Metamorphoses by Ovid, which has served as an inspiration for remakes by many later authors. The story of a young man who fell in love with his own reflection on the surface of the water contains a great variety of semantically strong structures (mainly the motifs of a mirror, narcissistic love, passively superior character of a hero, or the final metamorphoses into a flower), which are analysed in this study. The author of this study outlines the interpretational evolution of the myth of Narcissus in French literary history...