Adrian Daub's The Dynastic Imagination offers an unexpected account of modern German intellectual history through frameworks of family and kinship. Modernity aimed to brush off dynastic, hierarchical authority and to make society anew through the mechanisms of marriage, siblinghood, and love. It was, in other words, centered on the nuclear family. But as Daub shows, the dynastic imagination persisted, in time emerging as a critical stance by which the nuclear family's conservatism and temporal limits could be exposed. Focusing on the complex interaction between dynasties and national identity-formation in Germany, Daub shows how a lingering preoccupation with dynastic modes of explanation, legitimation, and organization suffused German literature and culture.
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Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of the literature, sciences, and history of ideas into the twentieth century. As early modernism discovered a standpoint from which to critique the nuclear family, remnants of dynastic ideology kept their hold variously on Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, Stefan George, and Sigmund Freud. At every stage of cultural progression, Daub reveals how the relation of dynastic to nuclear families inflected modern intellectual history.
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"The Dynastic Imagination is an utterly engrossing study that rethinks the very terms in which we pose questions about an era. In beautiful, lucid prose, Daub leads the reader through the metamorphoses of the concepts of the dynasty and the nuclear family, beginning with the shock waves of the French Revolution and extending well into the twentieth century. One of Daub's many noteworthy accomplishments in this volume is his deft interweaving of history of science, literary criticism, and cultural history. This book represents an important and exciting contribution to intellectual history." * Stefani Engelstein, Duke University *
"When we admit that modernity began as an antigenealogical experiment, which manifested in an antiauthoritarian, antipatriarchal, and antifamilial society, how can we understand our position in this transformed world? How do we try to escape the loneliness of extreme individualism? How do we recuperate a sense of family? These are unsettled waters, and Daub plumbs them to their greatest depths. His interlocutors-from Goethe to Stefan George-put thought into what the great experiment does to and with them." * Peter Sloterdijk, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design *
"The Dynastic Imagination is a pathbreaking, polyphonic intellectual history of modern dynastic and antidynastic thought. Ranging from the French Revolution to the aftermath of World War I (with an epilogue on the aftermath of World War II), this broad yet highly focused study shows how questions of inheritance and legitimacy underwrite many major intellectual movements, from Romanticism to naturalism to feminism and psychoanalysis." * Modern Language Quarterly *
"Daub's excavation of what the literary bourgeois believed about history and their own moment is something that historians of the family could take up productively to see some of the ways that it translated in reality." -- Emily Bruce * H-German *
"[The Dynastic Imagination] is an intellectual-historical exploration of the pervasive engagement with notions of 'dynasty,' generally in tension with notions of 'family' of a more nuclear sort, as they operate across a range of works written during the long nineteenth century . . . Daub delves deeply into the lives and thought of his selected subjects, in chapters that range across many aspects of dynasty and family as intellectual (and political) constructs." * Central European History *
