The concept of dynasty sat uneasily in nineteenth-century Europe. Democratic revolutions and ideals, communist agitations, and imaginations of the bourgeois family all took dynasties as objects of attack and opposition. Nevertheless, the concept retained an uncanny effectiveness, as barely reconceived versions of aristocratic kinship systems haunted the newly emergent ideology of the nuclear family. In literature in particular it came to structure narratives of Bildung and imaginations of bourgeois social order. Aristocratic systems of alliance and descent lost their genealogical foundation to reappear as concepts of spiritual paternity, origination, and inheritance, shadowed by the accumulated economic and social interests of houses and by new scientific theories of evolution and hereditary determination. From Romanticism’s uncanny kinship systems to the fictions of degeneracy in naturalism, dynasties thus provide a heuristic for understanding the construction of national literary canons and philologies, of philosophical schools and ideologies, as well as the range of traditionally defined literary movements from the nineteenth century. This panel invites contributions that examine bourgeois dynasties in a German-speaking context as contested and contradictory forms of cultural reproduction.

We envision a series of two or three panels on this topic. We plan on submitting these panels to the newly established GSA working group on kinship.

Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words and a CV to Adrian Daub (daub@stanford.edu) and Michael Thomas Taylor (mttaylor@ucalgary.ca) by January 10, 2011.