ABSTRACT
In thinking of a suitable focus for a volume of essays to appear in honour of Professor Helen Chambers we, the editors and colleagues of the School of Modern Languages at St Andrews, were faced with a difficult task: to engage with a research profile ranging from motifs of superstition in Fontane's prose to female Faust figures, while producing a coherent volume worthy of the recipient which would demonstrate the significance of her research for modern scholarship. It was inevitable that Fontane would occupy a prominent place in it. In a long series of publications, most notably the standard work The Changing Image of Theodor Fontane and the translations with Hugh Rorrison of Uminederbringlich and Effi Briest, Helen Chambers has shaped and analysed both the scholarly and the modern literary reception of the nineteenthcentury German author with the greatest international resonance. At the same time, much of Helen Chambers's work has focused on less canonical authors, on the processes of reception, adaptation, and translation, and has ranged beyond fiction and poetry to encompass journalism and marginalia. Throughout there is the concern to balance detailed textual analysis with an awareness of the men and women who write, rewrite, read, and transmit the texts we study, and a consistent returning to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing as a point from which these issues might profitably be explored.
