Peter Gay

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

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. Here, in this concise and inviting volume, he reformulates the definition of romanticism and provides a fresh account of the immense achievements of romantic writers and artists in all media. Gay’s scope is wide, his insights sharp. He takes on the recurring questions about how to interpret romantic figures and their works. Who qualifies to be a romantic? What ties together romantic figures who practice in different countries, employ different media, even live in different centuries? How is modernism indebted to romanticism, if at all? Guiding readers through the history of the romantic movement across Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, Gay argues that the best way to conceptualize romanticism is to accept its complicated nature and acknowledge that there is no “single basket” to contain it. Gay conceives of romantics in “families,” whose individual members share fundamental values but retain unique qualities. He concludes by demonstrating that romanticism extends well into the twentieth century, where its deep and lasting impact may be measured in the work of writers such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

In his most ambitious endeavour since Freud, acclaimed cultural historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of Modernism in the arts, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century.

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. In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought and restored it to its true place as an active and creative force through which knowledge of the world is achieved. In a new foreword, Peter Gay considers The Philosophy of the Enlightenment in the context in which it was written--Germany in 1932, on the precipice of the Nazi seizure of power and one of the greatest assaults on the ideals of the Enlightenment. He also argues that Cassirer's work remains a trenchant defense against enemies of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century.

The nine related essays in The Party of Humanity fall into three divisions: three are on Voltaire, presenting the great philosophe as a tough-minded, realistic man of letters who tried to reshape his world, rather than as a merely brittle and shallow wit. Then, three essays discuss the French Enlightenment as a whole and seek for the unity underlying the diversity of tempers and attitudes among its leaders. The last three, which include Mr. Gay's well-known critique of Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, challenge some widely accepted views of the Enlightenment. The longest chapter here is a detailed examination of Rousseau and his reputation among his interpreters. What all nine essays have in common, apart from their portrayal of the philosophes as serious and engaged partisans of humanity, is that they are essays in the social history of ideas; they all treat ideas as inseparable from the specific social and cultural setting from which they emerge, and which they affect.

A biography of the greatest musical mind in Western history Mozart's unshakable hold on the public's consciousness can only be strengthened by historian and biographer Peter Gay's concise and deft look at the genius's life. Mozart traces the development of the man whose life was a whirlwind of achievement, and the composer who pushed every instrument to its limit and every genre of classical music into new realms.

"A magisterial contribution to the history of ideas. A fresh, illuminating perspective on one of the pivotal figures of our time." —J. Anthony Lukas "[This] remarkable biography… briskly traces the story of Freud's life and education, deftly weaving the familiar narrative with a style that makes it seem fresh and lively." —Chicago Tribune

Der amerikanische Kulturhistoriker Peter Gay hat eine Lebens- und Werkbeschreibung des Psychoanalyse-Begründers Sigmund Freud geschrieben, die durch Stoff und Gedankenfülle, durch stilistische Brillanz und kunstvollen Aufbau besticht. Nach Meinung von Kritikern dürfte sie für längere Zeit die gültige Freud-Biografie sein. Das monumentale Werk kann zugleich als Einführung in Freuds Lehre dienen. Nie zuvor ist die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse so stringent mit dem Leben ihres Begründers und den historischen und geistesgeschichtlichen Bedingungen in Beziehung gesetzt worden.

Historian Peter Gay examines the relationship between fiction and history, and how seriously we can go wrong when we accept fiction as fact. In comprehensive readings of three classic works, he shows how the skilful reader can turn a novel into an aid to truth.

Från Tolvskillingsoperan av Brecht och Weill till Warburginstitutet, från Bauhaus till Bergtagen har Weimarrepubliken (19181933) blivit legendarisk för sin intensiva kreativitet under en tid av politiska omvälvningar. I denna livfulla framställning spårar den framstående historikern Peter Gay uppkomsten av den konstnärliga, litterära och musikaliska kultur som på 1920-talet fick en så kortvarig blomstring mitt i det kaos som utgjorde Tysklands bräckliga demokrati efter första världskriget, och som våldsamt krossades efter Hitlers makttillträde. Bland Peter Gays övriga böcker som översatts till svenska kan nämnas biografierna Freud och Mozart och den prisbelönta Upplysningstiden. Hans senast utgivna titel är Schnitzlers Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 18151914.

Exploring the social history of the 19th century, this text is the culmination of Peter Gay's 35 years of scholarship on bourgeois culture and society.

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.

Education of the Senses draws on a vast array of primary sources to reexamine nineteenth-century sexual behavior, overturning a number of stereotypes, especially about women and sexuality.

It explores an anxiety-provoking time when the boundaries between erotic expressiveness and reserve began to give way, changing the experience of love. "One of the major historical enterprises of the decade. . . . An enterprise requiring a daring and breadth of knowledge possessed by few other contemporary historians."—Gordon A. Craig, New York Review of Books "Gay's writing has an artist's feel for the flow and rhythms of language, and his extensive and exquisitely managed research is blended into a unified structure that consistently serves the author's purpose."—San Francisco Chronicle "The vicissitudes of the 'tender passion' in both the fiction and the real lives of the Victorians is an enthralling subject."—Anthony Storr, The Spectator

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.

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." Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age.

The Science of Freedom completes Peter Gay's brilliant reinterpretation begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. In the present book, he describes the philosophes' program and their views of society. His masterful appraisal opens a new range of insights into the Enlightenment's critical method and its humane and libertarian vision.

In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Now a master historian goes back to the sources to give a fully rounded account of its true accomplishments.