Schnitzler's Century - The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914 (Paperback, New Ed)

"This is cultural history of the first order, and it is liberal and humane history at its very best."—David Cannadine

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