Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914: The Making of the Middle Class Culture 1815-1914 - Hardcover

Gay, Peter

3.55

181 ratings by Goodreads

9780713994483: Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914: The Making of the Middle Class Culture 1815-1914

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713994487 ISBN 13: 9780713994483

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2001

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Although the originality and importance of Peter Gay's THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE have been widely acknowledged, its sheer size has restricted its audience. In SCHNITZLER'S CENTURY Gay provides a synthesis, in a single volume, of his great work, with significant new material, and which rethinks and recasts much of his original. Gay takes as his guide through the century Arthur Schnitzler, the most interesting Austrian playwright, novelist and short-story writer of his time, a complex man endowed with qualities (some attractive, some not) which make him a wonderfully credible and resourceful witness to the events described in the book. Schnitzler runs through it like a thread, tying the chapters together.

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Review:

"Through Gay's eyes we can get a warmer, more vivid and more accurate sense of the 'bourgeois experience' than has ever been available before." Sunday Telegraph "Schnitzler's Century is really a love story. [Gay's] latest book allows him to show off in a field he has made his own. [He] takes his chance elegantly and always interestingly." Andrew Lycett, Literary Review "Gay's own psychoanalytical approach is shown to brilliant and convincing effect... Schnitzler's Century [is] told with wisdom, wit and sensitivity." Financial Times

Synopsis:

Au audacious work, "Schnitzler's Century" reassesses 19th-century history and traces the dramatic rise of the middle class. We have always believed that corseted Queen Victoria defined the mores of the 19th century. Yet Peter Gay suggests in this provocative, seminal work that it is the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler, who provides a better symbol for the age. Challenging many of the sacrosanct theories of Darwin and Freud, Gay chronicles the rise of modernity in countries as diverse as Germany and Italy, England and the United States, and in doing so presents a century filled with science and superstition, revolutionaries and reactionaries, eros and anxiety - in short, an age of contradiction rendered remarkably clear by one of our most eloquent historians. Not since Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Narrative" has a century been brought alive as dramatically. "Schnitzler's Century" is a "tour de force", a work that tells us with remarkable lucidity how we came to be the way we are.

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