Generating the good: Fictions of genealogy in the literature, law, and science of eighteenth-century Germany.

摘要

This project investigates the shifting role of genealogy in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century representations of community in the discourses of literature, law, and science. It examines primarily German texts, but treats also select French and English imaginative and systematic works within the broader context of the European Enlightenment. “Generating the Good” explores the consequences of a developing interest during the eighteenth century in the physiological reality of blood-ties, producing a tension between scientifically proposed facts of heritability and kinship and the ideals of generational affinities that underpin the moral and political imagination of the period. This affects understandings of how variously scaled community groups (including family, region, nation, race, and species) are constituted.; Chapter One (“Legal Fictions of Genealogy”) presents a review of elements comprising the absolutist “genealogical” state, followed by an examination of the legal and social status of mothers and bastards, in order to identify significant inconsistencies in the logic of the law. The chapter ends with an analysis of how and why legal and scientific writers joined forces to demonstrate the reality of the biological blood-line. Chapter Two (“Lessing's Nathan and the ‘Visible Bands’ of Community”) provides an extended reading of Nathan der Weise , examining themes of lineage and bastardy to reveal the blood-tie as a social fiction that is at once necessary for a functioning community and possessed of tremendous capacity for abuse. Chapter Three (“A Question of Kind”) explores the developing scientific acceptance (German, French, and English) of a human kind or “species” as real and historical; it examines the extension of the species question to include theories of race and a blood-bound, historical nation, and weighs the significance of a morally charged language of kinship that informs this discourse. Chapter Four (“Improving the ‘Original Stamp’”) investigates the practical application of theories expounded in the prior chapter, with a focus on the medical police and Johann Peter Frank's efforts to identify a political responsibility to perfect the human (familial, racial, national) species.