The Aesthetics of Kinship

Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century

Heidi Schlipphacke

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781684484539, 9781684484546
• eBook ISBN: 9781684484553
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Middle Class/Bourgeois/Bürger: The Idiosyncrasies of German Dramatic Realism
• Chapter Two. Tableau/Tableau Vivant: German-French Dramatic Encounters
• Chapter Three. The German Dramatic Tableau beyond Lessing
• Chapter Four. Against Interiority: Letters and Portraits as Dramatic Props
• Chapter Five. Material Kinship: The Economy of Props in G. E. Lessing’s Nathan der Weise
• Chapter Six. The Tableau of Relations: Novels in Stillness and Motion
• Chapter Seven. Kinship and Aesthetic Depth: The Tableau Vivant in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities]
• Concluding Reflections
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author