A literatura popular deFranz Xaver von Schönwerth

Abstract

This master thesis aims to present the work of Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a collector of German Folktales from the 19th century, as well as translate some of these narratives. Schönwerth registered, from orality into writing, more than 500 traditional stories from his region, the Oberpfalz [Upper Palatine]. They remained untouched in a city archive in Regensburg until 2011. For a better understanding of those tales -their structure and content-, we conducted a study on popular culture and literature, highlighting the Romantic era in Germany, based particularly on the writings of Peter Burke, Alan Dundes and Rüdiger Safranski. Thereafter, we present Schönwerth's life and work in this context. The third and last chapter discusses the translation of some of his registered tales, based on the model of text analysis in Translation created by the German functionalist Christiane Nord. The stories we translate can be found in the appendix with explanatory notes