The Aesthetics of Kinship

The Aesthetics of Kinship interrupts discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations in literature of the period, this book complicates assumptions about the linear development of modern social, political, and aesthetic forms and presents a more heterogeneous view of the eighteenth-century literary social world.

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