Writing Switzerland

"The work of Peter von Matt, Switzerland's finest living literary critic, offers a model of humanistic scholarship par excellence: learned, gracious, elegant, dancing nimbly from history and culture to politics and philosophy. Von Matt thus weaves engaging literary analyses that are simultaneously interpretations not only of authors and texts but also of Swiss nationhood itself. Inspired in particular by his 2012 volume Das Kalb vor der Gotthardpost: Zur Literatur und Politik der Schweiz (winner of that year's Schweizer Buchpreis), this interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading North American scholars of Swiss Studies supplies a critical but appreciative engagement with von Matt's writing. Of interest to students of literature and of Switzerland, it is the first volume devoted specifically to probing the legacy of von Matt's thought. It is thus a worthy testimony to the richness and influence of one of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Switzerland's leading intellectuals"--