Over the last thirty years, it has become increasingly common for family histories to be researched from a political-historical perspective as well as in reference to the culture of remembrance (especially in Germany and Austria, but also in France). Despite its entanglement in the civilisational upheavals of the Second World War, Switzerland was not subject to its repercussions to the same extent as its neighbours; and yet, the discourse of remembrance is equally relevant for Swiss literature. In the present volume, the first question that arises is to what extent the research models applied to the genre of the family novel and the generational narrative in other literatures also apply to the literature(s) of Switzerland. Thus, the volume draws upon a multilingual corpus of German-, French-, and also Italian-language narratives from Switzerland in order to frame these diverse literary traditions within a common national context. In particular, the contributions to this volume examine how family stories are narrated within the broader spectrum of Swiss literature as a whole. Moreover, they ask whether contemporary Swiss literature provides a mirror — perhaps a distorted one — for viewing Swiss society itself in terms of the family structures encountered in these texts.
Published: 2022-12-30