"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." "In a set of 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 - its passions, politics, religion, and anxieties - that we can only think we know well. Extending his examination back to 1815, at the close of the age of Napoleon, Gay chronicles a hundred-year period that witnessed not only the emergence of the middle class but also the birth of a culture that remains vital today. Throughout Schnitzler's Century, he does justice to the complexity of the era, showing that there was superstition as well as science, cruelty as well as humanity, anxiety as well as Eros. But digging deep into bourgeois life all the way from Philadelphia to Moscow, London to Rome, he has recognized a general Victorian style through the Western world, however colored each country was by characteristic local habits." "Schnitzler's Century is not revision for its own sake, but for the sake of the truth about the past. With the daring Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler as his companion, Gay provides startling perspectives on once-familiar subjects. Schnitzler's Century provides astonishing insights into an age that made us largely what we are today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
"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.
This English translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Der Weg ins Freie” (1908) was first published in 1913 and is one of only two novels—the other being “Therese” (1928)—by the Viennese author, who was better known for his short stories and plays, including “Reigen” (“Round Dance”), known to most English-speaking readers as “La Ronde.” “The Road to the Open” tells the story of the aristocratic young composer Georg von Wergenthin-Recco who has talent but lacks the drive to get down to work and spends most of his time socializing with members of the assimilationist, artistically sensitive Jewish bourgeoisie of Vienna and other non-Jews like himself who enjoy their company. A love affair with a Catholic lower middle class girl, combined with the author’s authentic descriptions of the milieu, the arts, the psychology of love, and the anti-Semitism that was coming to dominate so much of life and politics in the Austria-Hungary of the time, make this novel a classic. “One of the most important, representative, revelatory works of Austria at the turn of the century....The best English version of the novel.”—Marc A. Weiner, Indiana University “In Arthur Schnitzler the two strands of Austrian fin-de-siècle culture, the moralistic and the aesthetic, were present in almost equal proportions. Small wonder that Freud hailed Schnitzler as a ‘colleague’ in the investigation of the ‘underestimated and much-maligned erotic.’”—Carl Schorske, author of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
A master historian shows us a new side of the Victorian Era--the role of the Bourgeois as reactionaries, revolutionaries, and middle-of-the-roaders in the passage of high culture toward modernism. The Victorians in this richly peopled narrative maneuvered through decades marked by frequent shifts in taste, some seeking safety in traditional styles, others drawn to the avant-garde of artists, composers, and writers. Peter Gay's panoramic survey offers a fresh view of the ideas and sensibilities that dominated Victorian culture.
"The ideas were in the air", is an oft-heard expression, particularly when there is a striking intersection of ideas as was the case in the works of Freud and Schnitzler. Luprecht establishes the University of Vienna Medical School as a significant source of these thinkers' shared intellectual views. Many of Freud's scientific concepts have already been traced to his medical education. But this book makes a convincing case for crediting the University of Vienna Medical School with a far deeper and more extensive influence on Freud and Schnitzler than has previously been recognized.
When Marie realises, with horror, that Felix is intent on making her fulfill her rash vow to die with him, she is left with a terrible conundrum: how can she escape with her life without compromising the self-imposed decorum of attending to the wishes of her dying lover? Schnitzler's talent as a dramatist shines through in this engrossing and shocking psychological study set in fin de siecle Vienna.
First English publication of a recently rediscovered novella by one of the greatest European writers One seemingly ordinary evening, Eduard Saxberger arrives home to find the fulfilment of a long-forgotten wish in his sitting room: a visitor has come to tell him that the youth of Vienna have discovered his poetic genius. Saxberger has written nothing for thirty years, yet he now realises that he is more than merely an Unremarkable Civil Servant, after all: a Venerable Poet, for whom Late Fame is inevitable - if, that is, his new acolytes are to be believed... Arthur Schnitzler was one of the most admired, provocative European writers of the twentieth century. The Nazis attempted to burn all of his work, but his archive was miraculously saved, and with it, Late Fame. Never published before, it is a treasure, a perfect satire of literary self-regard and charlatanism. Arthur Schnitzler (b. 1862 in Vienna) was one of the most influential European writers of the twentieth century, perhaps best known here for his novellas Dream Story and Fräulein Else. He qualified as a doctor but was increasingly driven to a career in writing, resulting in several celebrated plays, novellas and novels which explore the great existential subjects of the modern age: relationships, love, sex, ageing and death. Because his work dealt with subjects considered taboo, he frequently attracted the hostility of the authorities, consequently losing his position as Chief Medic in the Reserve Army and being tried for disorderly conduct. Schnitzler was close friends with Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud, who both admired him greatly, and a member of the 'Young Vienna' circle of writers who regularly met at a café nicknamed 'Café Megalomania' - the very same clique and café he satirises so deliciously in Late Fame. Schnitzler died in 1931. Pushkin Press also publishes his novellas Fräulein Else, Dying and Casanova's Return to Venice.
A fresh collection of essays on the work of one of the leading figures of the Viennese fin de siècle.This volume of specially commissioned essays takes a fresh look at the Viennese Jewish dramatist and prose writer Arthur Schnitzler. Fascinatingly, Schnitzler''s productive years spanned the final phase of the Habsburg monarchy, World War I, the First Austrian Republic, and the rise of National Socialism, and he realized earlier than many of his contemporaries the threat that racist anti-Semitism posed to the then almost complete assimilation of Austrian Jews. His writings also reflect the irresolvable conflict between emerging feminism and the relentless "scientific" discourse of misogyny, and he chronicles the collapse of traditional social structures at the end of the Habsburg monarchy and the struggles of the newly founded republic. In the 1950s Schnitzler''s powerful literary record assumed model character for Viennese Jewish intellectuals born after the Shoah, and his portrayal of gender relations and role expectations and casual sex are received with the same fascination today as they were by the audiences of his own time. Schnitzler remains a major figure in contemporary European culture, as his works are still widely read, performed, and adapted -- witness Stanley Kubrick''s adaptation of Schnitzler''s Traumnovelle as the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. In this volume a team of international scholars explores Schnitzler''s dramas and prose worksfrom contemporary critical vantage points, but within the context of Austria''s multicultural society at a time of unprecedented change. Contributors: Gerd Schneider, Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, Elizabeth Loentz, Iris Bruce, Felix Tweraser, Elizabeth Ametsbichler, Hillary Hope Herzog, Katherine Arens, John Neubauer, Imke Meyer, Susan C. Anderson, Eva Kuttenberg, and Matthias Konzett. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is professor of German at the University of Illinois-Chicago.e expectations and casual sex are received with the same fascination today as they were by the audiences of his own time. Schnitzler remains a major figure in contemporary European culture, as his works are still widely read, performed, and adapted -- witness Stanley Kubrick''s adaptation of Schnitzler''s Traumnovelle as the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. In this volume a team of international scholars explores Schnitzler''s dramas and prose worksfrom contemporary critical vantage points, but within the context of Austria''s multicultural society at a time of unprecedented change. Contributors: Gerd Schneider, Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, Elizabeth Loentz, Iris Bruce, Felix Tweraser, Elizabeth Ametsbichler, Hillary Hope Herzog, Katherine Arens, John Neubauer, Imke Meyer, Susan C. Anderson, Eva Kuttenberg, and Matthias Konzett. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is professor of German at the University of Illinois-Chicago.e expectations and casual sex are received with the same fascination today as they were by the audiences of his own time. Schnitzler remains a major figure in contemporary European culture, as his works are still widely read, performed, and adapted -- witness Stanley Kubrick''s adaptation of Schnitzler''s Traumnovelle as the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. In this volume a team of international scholars explores Schnitzler''s dramas and prose worksfrom contemporary critical vantage points, but within the context of Austria''s multicultural society at a time of unprecedented change. Contributors: Gerd Schneider, Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, Elizabeth Loentz, Iris Bruce, Felix Tweraser, Elizabeth Ametsbichler, Hillary Hope Herzog, Katherine Arens, John Neubauer, Imke Meyer, Susan C. Anderson, Eva Kuttenberg, and Matthias Konzett. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is professor of German at the University of Illinois-Chicago.e expectations and casual sex are received with the same fascination today as they were by the audiences of his own time. Schnitzler remains a major figure in contemporary European culture, as his works are still widely read, performed, and adapted -- witness Stanley Kubrick''s adaptation of Schnitzler''s Traumnovelle as the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. In this volume a team of international scholars explores Schnitzler''s dramas and prose worksfrom contemporary critical vantage points, but within the context of Austria''s multicultural society at a time of unprecedented change. Contributors: Gerd Schneider, Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, Elizabeth Loentz, Iris Bruce, Felix Tweraser, Elizabeth Ametsbichler, Hillary Hope Herzog, Katherine Arens, John Neubauer, Imke Meyer, Susan C. Anderson, Eva Kuttenberg, and Matthias Konzett. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is professor of German at the University of Illinois-Chicago.n time. Schnitzler remains a major figure in contemporary European culture, as his works are still widely read, performed, and adapted -- witness Stanley Kubrick''s adaptation of Schnitzler''s Traumnovelle as the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. In this volume a team of international scholars explores Schnitzler''s dramas and prose worksfrom contemporary critical vantage points, but within the context of Austria''s multicultural society at a time of unprecedented change. Contributors: Gerd Schneider, Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, Elizabeth Loentz, Iris Bruce, Felix Tweraser, Elizabeth Ametsbichler, Hillary Hope Herzog, Katherine Arens, John Neubauer, Imke Meyer, Susan C. Anderson, Eva Kuttenberg, and Matthias Konzett. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is professor of German at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
What was the function of the invocation of destiny in the increasingly secularized era of turn-of-the-century Vienna? By exploring this question, Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler's Prose offers a new psycho-sociological perspective on the narrative works of Arthur Schnitzler. While Vienna 1900 as a site of crisis has been established in the scholarship, this book focuses on the presence of forces that deny the existence of said crisis and work to contain its subversive and critical potential. Stereotype and destiny emerge in Schnitzler's prose texts as a form of these counter-critical forces. In her readings, Kolkenbrock shows that stereotype and destiny serve as an interrelated coping mechanism for a central psychological conflict of modernity: the paradoxical need to be recognized as 'normal' and 'special' at the same time. While, through the complex of "stereotype and destiny," Schnitzler's prose addresses central modern questions of identity and subjecthood, Kolkenbrock's close readings also reveal how the texts inscribe themselves aesthetically in the literary tradition of Romanticism and as such offer crucial sources for understanding Schnitzler's representations of embattled subjecthood within broader social and aesthetic traditions.
