The Aesthetics of Kinship interrupts discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations in literature of the period, this book complicates assumptions about the linear development of modern social, political, and aesthetic forms and presents a more heterogeneous view of the eighteenth-century literary social world.

Around 1800, German Romantics fixated on Dante’s Divine Comedy as a model for the creation of a new mythology of reason. This book traces that fixation across Romantic and Neo-Romantic texts, showing how the Romantic Dante cult in fact generated ominous amalgams of art, myth, and fascism in the twentieth century.

The essays in this volume discuss critical developments in the philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, politics, and poetics of play around 1800. They illustrate that, in this time period, the parameters are set that continue to guide our debates about what are good rather than bad games or practices of play.