Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud: 0 - Hardcover

Gay, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393045706 ISBN 13: 9780393045703

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998

Synopsis

In uncovering the roots of modernism, a master historian shows us a hidden side of the Victorian era, the role of the bourgeois as reactionaries, revolutionaries, and middle-of-the-roaders in the passage of high culture toward modernism."In the Victorian decades, the name bourgeois was at once a term of reproach and a source of self-respect". So Peter Gay opens his newest and perhaps most surprising work. For the Victorians we meet in this volume are not the stodgy, complacent characters of drawing-room comedy. They are instead a varied crowd, from the capitalists in the top tier of the bourgeoisie eager to be recognized as gentlemen or, better yet, dubbed as nobility to those at the bottom of the pile, the clerks and craftsmen mortally afraid of sinking into the mass of the proletariat. What they share is an anxiety, driven by their concern to advance up the social pyramid or at least to maintain the status they have achieved.Some of the individuals in this richly peopled narrative turn on their own class, none more bitterly than Gustave Flaubert; others celebrate their success, whether in Manchester or in Munich, by sponsoring symphony orchestras or establishing museums; still others become cultural hunters and gatherers, turning their newly acquired fortunes to the private accumulation of art, ranging from the "safe" works of the old masters to the daring innovations of the Impressionists.The stage is thus set for the explosion of modernism accompanied by an inevitable reaction against the subversive avant-garde of artists, composers, and writers as varied as Cezanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Shaw, Ibsen, and Zola. No one reading this concluding volume of Peter Gay's magnificentrevaluation of the nineteenth century will ever again use the term Victorian as a synonym for dull.

About this title

Review:

‘Such is Mr Gay’s breadth of learning that at times it seems impossible to believe that a single person could know so much and in such detail... With the aid of Freud, the nineteenth-century conflicts between instinct and civilization are here as fully examined as anybody could wish.’
Frank Kermode, New York Times Book Review

From the Back Cover:

"Peter Gay deserves to be congratulated for what will surely be a landmark in revisionist literature about the Victorians . . . a fascinating insight into our own anti-bourgeois obsessions."
DANIEL BRITTEN, 'Independent on Sunday'

"Packed with fascinating material about the place of art in the lives of prosperous enlightened businessmen. 'Pleasure Wars' gives a plausible account of the place in the history of art of innumerable middle-class patrons, shoppers and collectors – the individuals who founded the orchestras and art galleries, libraries and major art collections, which would form a focus of high cultural life in the expanding cities of the late century. Gay chronicles the anxious love-hate relationships between cultural producers and consumers, the artists and the middle-classes they relied on but loved to hate. . with a magisterially touched by nostalgia for the ancien regime whose sad, triumphant story he tells in this immense panoramic survey."
HUGH HAUGHTON, 'Observer'

"One cannot help admiring the vision behind Peter Gay's vast enterprise 'The Bourgeois Experience', of which 'Pleasure Wars' is the fifth and final volume. Overall, it amounts to a comprehensive resurrection of a class too long despised . . . No historian wears such a learning so lightly when it comes to telling a story in mellow prose. Gay has few peers."
ROY PORTER, 'Sunday Times'

AS usual, drawing on a dizzy array of sources, Gay works them into a narrative both fluid and precise, grand and detailed, from time to time stopping to nail a point with a detailed case history, such as that of Victor Chocquet a humble customs-house clerk, who spent every sou he had collecting pictures by Cézanne, and every ounce of energy trying to explain to sceptical friends just why the visible brush strokes and dodgy perspective meant the man was a genius. Extraordinary . . . in a bravura performance, gay claims that he, like Freud has always known there is a social world independent of our imaginings. Things happen that we have not invented or unconsciously summoned up. The trick says Gay lies in finding a way to move backwards and forwards between the two worlds, the historic world 'out there' and the version of it which we create out of fear and desire. And if anyone doubts that it can be done, they have only to read gay to see what has already been magnificently achieved."
KATE HAMILTON, 'Literary Review'

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0393045706
• ISBN 13: 9780393045703
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336