The Dynastic Imagination

""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"--