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.