Emeritus Professor Helen Chambers
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Research areas
My principal research areas are 19th- and early 20th-century German and Austrian literature, especially Theodor Fontane and Joseph Roth, as well as women's writing, gender, reportage, Anglo-German cultural relations, reception history and literary translation. Through my work on Fontane and Roth I developed an interest in literary irony, which led to a major study of humour and irony in nineteenth-century German women's writing. Humour is not widely recognised as a characteristic of German writing, and there is a widespread perception, not only in German-language culture, that it is not a female prerogative, particularly in the 19th century. My research into the work of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach among others shows otherwise.