Open Access

With reference to Shakespeare's play "The Winter's Tale" and its adaptation "The Gap of Time" by Jeanette Winterson the following master thesis seeks to explore literature’s ability to update and rework a given text in a sense that the new text reflects the condition humana in relation to current social and cultural milieus thereby demonstrating the actuality of the original text and constituting a genuinely new work of art in its own right at the same time.

Written during the fin de siècle, a period known as one of “sexual anarchy,” Ménie Muriel Dowie’s feminist Gallia (1895) joins the literary works of famous writers like Mona Caird or Sarah Grand. Wells. But although her novel covers the most explosive topics of the nineteenth century, namely degeneration and the female pursuit of emancipation, Dowie does not achieve great distinction as the limited se-lection of secondary literature on Gallia confirms. From my point of view, this has mostly to do with Dowie’s radical ideas on maintaining Britain’s health and su-premacy, as well as with the novel’s unconventional structure according that makes it hard to say what Dowie actually drives at. Superficially, Gallia might look like a conventional, but failed love-story with a strong and feminist heroine. But on sec-ond glance, one realises that some more important structure underlies this stereo-type-looking plot. Dowie’s creed is not that man is the measure – although the pub-licly powerful positions in this novel are all held by male characters – but that women set the new benchmarks for Britain’s society by secretly pulling the strings in order to disengage from male dominance.