The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud Volume 1: Education of the Senses - Softcover

Gay, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195037286 ISBN 13: 9780195037289

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1985

Synopsis

With this book, Peter Gay begins a project of enormous scope and imagination: a multi-volume study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820s to the outbreak of World War I. he Bourgeois Experience, which will eventually comprise at least five volumes, explores the much-neglected but all-important role that human drives and emotions played in the shaping of Victorian culture.
In Education of the Senses Gay re-examines the sexual behavior and attitudes of the Victorians, overturning many ttpersistent myths about the era and challenging, in particular, the notion that bourgeois women could not enjoy sexuality. Immense in scope yet finely detailed, this book abounds in fascinating glimpses of individual lives. A provocative and absorbing study, Education of the Senses marks an auspicious beginning to a project that promises to change the way we view the past.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Gay is at University of Yale.

Review:

"Gay's book is controversial but brilliant (as are most of his books). It is well-written and thoroughly researched and should be an excellent required reading for my upper division cultural history of Europe course. My students should have endless fun arguing with Professor Gay and his hero, Sigmund Freud."--Richard Camp, California State University

"[The first volume of] what promises to be one of the major historical enterprises of the decade."--The New York Review of Books

"Gay has written a first-rate synthesis of one of the dimensions most central to the so-called 'bourgeois experience,' sexuality and sexual behavior."--Gerald Michael Schnabel, Bemidji State University

"Legitimize[s] sexuality itself as a subject of serious historical research...a wonderful and literate book."--Journal of Modern History

"Magisterial...witty and ingenious....Everything about this book is excellent."--Review of Psychoanalytic Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0195037286
• ISBN 13: 9780195037289
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576