Joy Charnley

Malcolm Pender

Images of Switzerland: Challenges from the Margins, appearing at a time when Swiss identity is under severe pressure, deals with perceptions of Switzerland held by a variety of minority groups. A historical review of attitudes to Jews prior to World War Two precedes chronologically essays on recent perceptions of marginalisation in literature written by women, manifestations of the Fremdarbeiter in German-Swiss literature, the outsider in the work of Lukas Hartmann and socially disadvantaged figures in recent Italian-Swiss writing.

Challenges from the Margins

Images of Switzerland

Susan Bainbrigge

Caroline Verdier

Comment aborder la littérature des espaces francophones européens en dehors de la France ? Identité et/ou altérité ? Qu'en pensent les auteur-e-s concerné-e-s vis-à-vis de leur écriture ? Ce volume est issu du colloque qui a eu lieu à l'Université d'Edimbourg les 14 et 15 mars 2008, dont les objectifs étaient d'explorer les notions d'identité et d'altérité dans les espaces francophones européens, tout particulièrement en Belgique et en Suisse romande, sans oublier les écrivain-e-s qui sont en quelque sorte en exil par rapport à leur pays et/ou leur langue. Ce livre présente un éventail d'auteur-e-s et de textes, du 19e au 21e siècle, y compris Bovard, Brel, Cingria, Gevers, Michaux, Nothomb, Nougé, Plisnier ou encore Verhaeren sans oublier les écrivaines Anne-Lise Grobéty, Marie-José Piguet, Silvia Ricci Lempen et Elisa Brune présentes au colloque et qui ont participé à une table ronde retranscrite dans ce volume. Le domaine de la traduction est également représenté, pour étudier la façon dont les oeuvres sont traduites, parfois par l'auteur-e même. Les contributions viennent de nombreux pays, et les auteur-e-s sont tous/toutes réuni-e-s par la langue française et l'amour de la littérature francophone de tous horizons.

identité et altérité dans les espaces francophones européens

Francographies

Barbara Burns

This volume brings together two very popular and active research fields: Swiss Studies and Intercultural Studies. It includes contributions on the movement of ideas, literatures, and individuals from one culture to another or one language to another, and the ways in which they have been either assimilated or questioned. All of the writers explore this general theme; some come from a literary angle, some look at linguistic inventiveness and translation, whilst others study the problems faced when crossing geographical and cultural borders or presenting ideas which do not `travel¿ well. By emphasising the connections, borrowings and mutual influences between Switzerland and other countries such as Germany, Hungary, France, the UK, and the Americas, the articles reaffirm the importance for Switzerland of intellectual openness and cultural exchange. Barbara Burns is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow. She has published books and articles on a number of nineteenth-century German writers including Theodor Storm, Detlev von Liliencron, Louise von François and Adolf Müllner, and also has an interest in Swiss Studies, in particular the work of Eveline Hasler on which she has recently been publishing. She is Germanic Editor of the MHRA journal The Year¿s Work in Modern Language Studies. Joy Charnley has co-edited eight volumes of essays on Swiss literatures and history with Malcolm Pender and in 1996 they co-founded the Centre for Swiss Cultural Studies in Glasgow. She has written books and articles on French-speaking Swiss authors such as Yvette Z¿Graggen, Alice Rivaz, Anne-Lise Grobéty, Anne Cuneo, Janine Massard and Amélie Plume.

Cultural Exchange and Conflict : Papers in Honor of Malcolm Pender

Crossing Frontiers

Caroline Verdierq

Academic work in a range of disciplines has been making an important contribution to the fraught and confusing debate around ageing, and through writers’ consciousness and experience, literature, just like economics, psychology, history and sociology, can provide valuable insights into the attitudes and prejudices prevalent in society. The present volume adds to this burgeoning field by providing a wide spectrum of literary analyses drawing on a range of approaches (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and feminist theory, amongst others) and covering a broad geographical area (France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland, in addition to Francophone Canada and Morocco). Major writers such as Balzac, Cervantes, Goethe, Mann and Zola are discussed here, as well as a number of important twentieth-century writers (Ben Jelloun, Cixous, Doubrovsky, Ernaux, Roy and Ungaretti) and less well-known figures (Carvalho, Châtelet and Fleutiaux). Within the broad themes which structure the volume, many others also emerge, overlapping and often recurring in several sections. These constant echoes between essays remind us that, whatever the geographical location or the period in history, similar issues remain pertinent across time and space, whether it be family relations, generational solidarity, sadness and loneliness, memory and dementia, class differences, gender differences or sexuality. Together, these essays contribute to the existing body of critical work by providing a series of portraits of what age is, has been and might be in the future. Collectively they demonstrate once more the power of literature to reflect or even prefigure social trends, encouraging us to consider carefully what we think, how we live and how we might shape our future societies.

Portraits of Age

As Time Goes By

Mariangela Palladino

Lucia Aiello

The essays included in this volume mostly originate from the conference organised by the editors at Glasgow Women’s Library in March 2012. Language, multilingual narratives and interaction between cultures and languages were key themes of the conference. Interdisciplinary and international, the conference, like this edited volume, brought together specialists working in a range of fields and provided an opportunity for exchanges between historians, sociologists, scientists and literary scholars, as well as between theoreticians and practitioners, academics and non-academics. In spite of these many different approaches, all the papers presented here transcend the idea of ‘national identity’ as an epic heritage or destiny, both linguistic and literary, and suggest a much more fluid definition of citizenship. Working from this perspective and within this general framework, both the editors and the contributors of this volume encourage a broader discussion on women’s narratives of displacement that compels us to rethink the notions of ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native speaker’ and raises philosophical questions about linguistic ownership; in other words, whether a language is owned, appropriated, imposed or rejected and how women experience and express their sense of ‘permanent strangeness’.

Joy Charnley

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