Schnitzler's Century: Tha Making of the Middle-Class, 1815-1914

An audacious work, Schnitzler's Century reassesses nineteenth-century history and traces the dramatic rise of the middle class. We have always believed that corseted Queen Victoria defined the mores of the nineteenth century. Yet Peter Gay asserts 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 sacrosanct notions about middle-class prudery and hypocrisy, he shows that in important ways, the Victorians were not Victorians. 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 anxietyin short, an age of contradiction rendered remarkably clear by one of our most eloquent historians. Not since Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror has a century been brought alive as dramatically. Schnitzler's Century is nothing less than a tour de force, a work that tells us with remarkable lucidity how we came to be the way we are. 13 b/w illustrations.