Awards

• Short-listed for Kenshur Book Prize, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University 2018

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9780231180412

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Reviews

Appealing and intellectually exciting. * Monatshefte * A provocative and elegant study that deserves the attention of every historian of nineteenth-century science. * Isis * Wide-ranging and intriguing. * Choice * The scope, complexity, and importance of Sibling Action is extraordinary: working fluently and fluidly across German, French, and British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures and sciences, as well as ancient Greek tragedy and its modern interpretations, Engelstein establishes convincingly that the sibling is a key boundary object by means of which many of our modern disciplines, as well as the very notion of disciplinarity, have established themselves. Sibling Action is an enormous contribution not only to German and British literary studies, but also to science studies and contemporary feminist theory, and is certain to be a key reference in all of those fields for a long time to come. -- Robert Mitchell, author of <i>Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature</i> In an utterly original way, Engelstein reveals how the figure of the sibling-not quite self and not quite other-has shaped Western understandings of biology, language, and politics. Through deft analysis, she uncovers an epistemological move that since the late eighteenth century has been destabilizing quests for origins and descriptions of unique, historically grounded individuals: a lateral rather than a vertical comparison that blurs boundaries by claiming both affinity and difference. -- Laura Otis, author of <i>Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists</i> This ambitious, powerful, and highly original study examines the figure of the sibling as a major anchoring device of the epistemological and political systems of modernity-a figure that not only relays the great shift from a vertical model of sovereignty to a horizontal one of fraternite but also causes trouble for the various systems it underwrites by transforming dichotomies into more open relational structures. At the same time, Engelstein interrogates the gender politics of this master trope by way of the figure of the sister, whose role in the new citizenship model that emerged from the French Revolution was to provide a locus of stable affective bonding, while being excluded from the public sphere. Through incisive readings of texts by Sophocles, Schiller, Rousseau, Lessing, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, and George Eliot, among others, Engelstein open up archives in a new way and adds her eloquent voice to the ongoing discussion of cosmopolitanism and participatory democracy. -- Marc Redfield, author of <i>Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America</i> As inviting, invigorating, and stimulating an academic book as I have encountered. An astonishing read from the first page to the last. -- Adrian Daub, Stanford University

Author Information

Stefani Engelstein is associate professor and chair of the department of Germanic languages and literature at Duke University. She is the author of Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (2008) and coeditor of Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (2011).

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