Schnitzler's Century: The Making of the Middle-class Culture 1815-1914 Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Schnitzler's Century: The Making of the Middle-class Culture 1815-1914 Book

Prolific author Peter Gay describes the rise of the middle class in the 19th century through an unexpected lens: the life of Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Yet Gay's themes are much larger than the somewhat obscure Schnitzler: "If we may call [my book] a biography at all, it is one of a class," he writes. Schnitzler's Century necessarily focuses on the Victorians--a term often applied only to the British, but here extended to all of Europe and the United States--and Gay seeks to portray them in their complexity and diversity. "There are many people who think they have grasped the Victorian mentality when they have smiled at gushy keepsakes, maudlin poems, shy euphemisms, silences about matters that matter," he writes. In fact, "they lived with their eyes open." Gay has written a history of habits, with close attention paid to sexual ones. It is the sort of provocative book that the stereotypical Victorian would want to see removed from the storefront window--but also would want to peek at when nobody else was looking. --John MillerRead More

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  • Product Description

    An essential work for anyone who wishes to understand the social history of the nineteenth century, Schnitzler's Century is the culmination of Peter Gay's thirty-five years of scholarship on bourgeois culture and society. Using Arthur Schnitzler, the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright, as his master of ceremonies, Gay offers a brilliant reexamination of the hundred-year period that began with the defeat of Napoleon and concluded with the conflagration of 1914. This is a defining work by one of America's greatest historians. 12 b/w illustrations.

    "If the past is envisioned as a foreign country, then there is no one, living or dead, better suited to serve as our guide than Peter Gay. In Schnitzler's Century, he has distilled a lifetime of learning into 320 pages of sparkling prose....I can't remember the last time I had such fun—and learned so much—from any work of history or nonfiction."—David Nasaw, winner of the Bancroft Prize for The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst

  • 0393323633
  • 9780393323634
  • Peter Gay
  • 26 November 2002
  • W. W. Norton & Co.
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 368
  • New edition
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