The Aesthetics of Kinship

Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century

Heidi Schlipphacke

2022
354 pages
$42.95
ISBN 9781684484539
New Studies in the Age of Goethe

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.

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Reviews
"[A]n incisive rethinking of a widely naturalized construction of the bourgeois nuclear family and its representation in the long eighteenth century." - Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch, 2024

"Schlipphacke brilliantly deconstructs the divisions between interiority and exteriority, mimetic and allegorical art forms, and kinship and the nuclear family in the literature of the long eighteenth century in a way that reveals the haziness of forms of thought, aesthetics, and sociality in transition and enables us to see the queer constellations of elective social affinities at the center of eighteenth-century German literature." -German Studies Review, October 2024

"[A] thoroughly innovative and convincing analysis of the significance and uniqueness of the tableau in German dramas and literature during the Enlightenment and Classical periods." - Oxford German Studies, May 2024

"[O]ffers genuinely new ways of understanding the ways in which dramas and novels from around 1750 to 1820 depict - and, in depicting, imagine, suggest, and experiment with - affective ties that are not limited to the strictly biological." - Monatshefte, Fall 2023

"[A] challenging but rewarding study. It forces the reader to reconsider assumptions about the rise of the nuclear family in early-modern Europe. It also provides valuable tools for analyzing visual and ekphrastic elements of literature." - New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, Summer 2023

"Historically significant and extremely timely! Schlipphacke's fascinating turn to the period tableaux compellingly illustrates aesthetic experiments with diverse forms of relations, fruitfully challenging accounts of the rise of the nuclear family." - Stefani Engelstein, author of Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity

"Schlipphacke's smart style brings the eighteenth-century tableau into vivid life. This wonderfully learned study expands our understanding of the eighteenth-century tableau beyond its immediate theatrical and painterly associations to show how it reframed models of family and kinship." - Daniel Purdy, author of On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought

"Schlipphacke demonstrates an active curiosity and adept intellect as she analyzes literary forms." - Alice Kuzniar, author of The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism

"[A] thoroughly new understanding of how German authors, including major ones like Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, used tableaux, props, and letters to highlight multiple types of family kinships that depict heterogeneous social groupings that highlight diversity, and that defy any narrow definition of 'family.'" - Susan Gustafson, author of Goethe's Families of the Heart

About the author:

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.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150.00, 9781684484546; EPUB: $42.95, 9781684484553