Culture of Switzerland - Literature

Literature

In the field of literature Switzerland produced a number of very well known writers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was from Geneva. The critic and historian Jacob Burckhardt was from Basel. The house of Germaine de Staël in Coppet was a centre of European literary life during the 18th century. Other writers include Gottfried Keller, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Jeremias Gotthelf and Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. Hermann Hesse and Carl Spitteler both won a Nobel Prize for their works.

In the 20th century the plays of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch impressed readers beyond the borders of Switzerland. There are a great number of regional dialects, especially in the German language. Even though standard German is commonly used for writing, there is a living dialect literature in many areas.

For children's culture there is the cartoon character Globi.

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Famous quotes containing the word literature:

    Since people no longer attend church, theater remains as the only public service, and literature as the only private devotion.
    Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)

    It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
    Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

    Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)