Contemporary Literary Criticism | Gay, Peter - Diana Schaub (review date June 1998)

Diana Schaub (review date June 1998)

SOURCE: Schaub, Diana. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume V: Pleasure Wars, by Peter Gay. Commentary 105, no. 6 (June 1998): 71–73.

[In the following review, Schaub criticizes The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume V: Pleasure Wars for failing to provide a cohesive picture of bourgeois culture.]

“Victorian” and “bourgeois” have become distinctly less acceptable as synonyms for hypocritical and philistine in the wake of the Yale historian Peter Gay's monumental reexamination of 19th-century European and American culture. His revisionist history has taken shape in five volumes bearing the collective title The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. The burden of the whole has been to show the variety and complexity of bourgeois life through a focus on certain fundamental human passions.

Gay's researches into the inner life of...

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