The Aesthetics of Kinship

The Aesthetics of Kinship intervenes critically into rigidified discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family and the corresponding interior subject in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations instead of "family plots" in seminal literary works of the period, this book presents an alternative view of the eighteenth-century literary social world and its concomitant ideologies. Whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and political theory posit the nuclear family as a microcosm for the ideal modern nation-state, literature of the period offers a far more heterogeneous image of kinship structures, one that includes members of various classes and is not defined by blood. Through a radical re-reading of the multifarious kinship structures represented in literature of the long eighteenth century, The Aesthetics of Kinship questions the inevitability of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and invokes alternative futures for conceptions of social and political life.

HEIDI SCHLIPPHACKE is a professor of Germanic studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research explores the intersections of aesthetics, gender, sexuality, and social forms in the European Enlightenment and in post-WWII German-language literature, thought, and film. She is the author of Nostalgia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film (Bucknell University Press).

List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1          Middle Class/Bourgeois/Bürger: The Idiosyncrasies of German Dramatic Realism
2          Tableau/Tableau Vivant: German-French Dramatic Encounters
3          The German Dramatic Tableau beyond Lessing
4          Against Interiority: Letters and Portraits as Dramatic Props
5          Material Kinship: The Economy of Props in G.E. Lessing's Nathan der Weise
6          The Tableau of Relations: Novels in Stillness and Motion
7          Kinship and Aesthetic Depth: The Tableau Vivant in Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities]
Concluding Reflections
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index