Materialising Identity: The Co-construction of the Gotthard Railway and Swiss National Identity

摘要

Judith Schueler's Materialising Identity is based on the work of Gabrielle Hecht (The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II [1998]), which relates the building of the nuclear power capacity of France to the concept of national identity in France. What Schueler does is relate the building and running of the Gotthard Railway with the changing perception of Swiss national identity. She does not concentrate on political, philosophical, literary, and material culture sources, as is the case with two standard studies of the railway line: Guy Marchal's Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte (2006) and the Swiss National Museum in Zurich's edited Die Erfindung der Schweiz 1848-1998 (1998).