Product Description: A renowned scholar’s reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them With his usual wit and élan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period...read more

Product Description: In this classic work of intellectual history, Ernst Cassirer provides both a cogent synthesis and a penetrating analysis of one of history's greatest intellectual epochs: the Enlightenment. Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of the preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world...read more

Traces and explores the rise of artistic Modernism, the cultural movement that shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. This book explores the modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms.

Product Description: “Rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study.”―Lee Siegel, New York Times Book Review Peter Gay explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film...read more

Product Description: Norton celebrates the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth by reissuing Peter Gay’s best-selling biography, featuring a new introduction.

Focusing on three literary masterpieces--Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks--the author of The Enlightenment explores the complex relationship between history and literature, reality and fiction, to reveal the essence of literary truth. Reprint. (view table of contents)

Documents the rise of the middle class by focusing on Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler, who defined the mores of the nineteenth century, and challenges theories from such intellectual innovators as Darwin and Freud.

Focusing on three literary masterpieces--Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks--the author of The Enlightenment explores the complex relationship between history and literature, reality and fiction, to reveal the essence of literary truth. (view table of contents)

A seminal work as melodious and haunting as the era it chronicles.First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century. Vivid and eminently readable, Weimar Culture is the finest introduction for the casual reader and historian alike. 16 black and white illustrations (view table of contents)

The National Book Award-winning author of The Enlightenment chronicles the life and work of the great composer, from child prodigy to mature musical genius, and assesses his seminal influence on the history of Western music. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

Product Description: During the 1970s and 1980s, the study of intellectual and cultural history was often denigrated for its alleged elitist and canonical nature. Today, the situation has changed dramatically. Enriched by the methods and insights of such neighboring areas of inquiry as social history, the history of mentalités, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and art history, intellectual and cultural history is experiencing a renewed vitality...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939—“the story,” says Peter Gay, “of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.”  With his customary eloquence and analytic acumen, Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings—then and now—toward Germany and the Germans...read more

Product Description: The Tender Passion looks at the Victorian middle classes' ideal and real notions of love. It explores an anxiety-provoking time when the boundaries between erotic expressiveness and reserve began to give way, changing the experience of love...read more

The final volume in the Yale historian's ambitious, ground-breaking study of middle-class life in Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century reveals the pleasures and anxieties of the Victorian upper and lower bourgeoisie. Reprint.

Product Description: Part of a two-volume study of the Enlightenment, this volume develops a social history of the period, the "Philosophes" and their background. The author provides insights into the Enlightenment's critical methods and its humane and libertarian visions.

Product Description: Book by Gay, Peter

Product Description: In The Naked Heart, Peter Gay explores the bourgeoisie's turn inward.At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport...read more

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Product Description: The eighteenth-century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age, when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world. In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: With the same sweep, authority, and originality that marked his best-selling Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay here takes us on a remarkable journey through middle-class Victorian culture.Gay's search through middle-class Victorian culture, illuminated by lively portraits of such daunting figures as Bismarck, Darwin and his acolytes, George Eliot, and the great satirists Daumier and Wilhelm Busch, covers a vast terrain: the relations between men and women, wit, demagoguery, and much more...read more