Arising from a colloquium held in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in March 2004, this volume offers fresh insights into Swiss culture and literature from an Irish perspective. It brings together articles by writers and scholars from various academic fields including cultural studies, linguistics and literature. The book is a reflection of the multifaceted interests of Irish academics in Switzerland as a cultural space in the heart of Europe. Ireland as a vantage point, situated at the western margin of the European continent, offers new perspectives from which differences as well as surprising parallels between the two cultures become visible and from which Switzerland appears in a different light. The volume critically addresses questions of identity in Swiss literature and culture and discusses them from various angles - by analysing the representation of minority cultures in Swiss literary and media discourse, by reading Swiss literature in an intercultural context, but also through accounts of Irish visitors in Switzerland and Swiss writers travelling to or living in Ireland.

The Editors: Patrick Studer is Embassy of Switzerland Lecturer in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in English linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on media and intercultural studies.

Sabine Egger is a Lecturer in German Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Currently completing her doctorate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin about images of the 'Other' in the poetry of Johannes Bobrowski, she has published articles on questions of collective identity in 20th-century German literature and culture, the teaching and learning of literature and intercultural awareness.