Norton / hardcover

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Schnitzler's Century

by by Peter Gay

We have always believed that Queen Victoria defined the mores of the nineteenth century. Yet Peter Gay, one of our most eminent cultural historians, asserts in this radical work that it is the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), the most influential Austrian writer of his time, who provides a better symbol for the age. Why Schnitzler? Although he was hardly the archetypal bourgeois citizen of his cultured society, Schnitzler was, as Gay comments in his preface, "endowed with qualities that make him a credible and resourceful witness to the middle-class world," whose emergence Gay so dramatically chronicles. Thus, Schnitzler becomes "a kind of master of ceremonies," an historical figure whose problematic parental relationship, sexual obsessions, much-catalogued romances, and troubling neuroses serve as the impetus to broader investigations of nineteenth-century history. In a set on nine closely linked chapters, each focusing on major topics of bourgeois life, Gay synthesizes three decades of far-ranging research, presenting a lucid reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century middle class; it's passions, politics, religion, and anxieties; that we only think we know well.