[3] She has written two books, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY 2008) and Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017), which was published in German as Geschwister-Logik.
[4] Engelstein’s first book, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse, traced the way that the body and the scientific fields that investigated it came to be used to legitimate social organization in the modern period.
Anxious Anatomy explores the epigenesis – preformation debate in research on reproduction and healing around 1800 and its relationship to social formations such as class, race, sex, and ethics.
[6] Modern genealogical knowledge systems, on which collective identities have been built, are therefore both inherently unstable, Sibling Action argues.
The book explores the histories of these fields and grants a special status to literary experimentation with the models they established.