The Dynastic Imagination - by Adrian Daub (Paperback)

About the Book

""Dynasties" offers an unexpected account of modern German identity through frameworks of family and kinship. Modernity aimed to brush off all 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 Adrian Daub shows, the dynastic imagination persisted, betraying the nuclear family's conservatism and temporal limits. Indeed, Daub argues that dynastic power loomed as a political specter and cultural force in the imaginations even of increasingly urbane, bourgeois Europeans. Focusing on the incipient German state, Daub shows how a lingering preoccupation with dynasties suffused public life and surfaced everywhere in literature and culture. Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of the literature, sciences, and history of ideas into the twentieth century. The French Revolution and Enlightenment spurred the need to unravel the binds of heredity; Romanticism sentimentalized family structure; post-1848 feminist thought questioned prevailing ideas of sovereignty; and remnants of dynastic ideology kept their hold variously on Richard Wagner, âEmile 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"--

Book Synopsis

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.
​
Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of literature, sciences, and the history of ideas, engaging with remnants of dynastic ideology in the work of Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, and Stefan George, and in the work of early feminists and pioneering psychoanalysts. At every stage of cultural progression, Daub reveals how the relation of dynastic to nuclear families inflected modern intellectual history.

Review Quotes

"[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"

"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" (11/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"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"

"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 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"

About the Author

Adrian Daub is professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, where he also directs the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.