Books by Peter Gay

The historian and Freud biographer Peter Gay, here offers insights into Freud's life and thought. In eight essays, Gay explores topics ranging from Freud and Shakespeare to Freud's favourite jokes, from the names Freud chose for his children to Gay's review of "The Interpretation of Dreams".

With his usual wit and elan, 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 "e;single basket"e; to contain it. Gay conceives of romantics in "e;families,"e; 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.

The Tender Passion looks at the Victorian middle classes' ideal and real notions of love.

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.

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.

What does an historian's style reveal? In this original and lucid guide to the proper reading of Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt-great historians who were also great stylists-Peter Gay demonstrates that, style is an invaluable clue to the historian's insight. Thus, for Peter Gay, style is the key to culture, and the "truth" of history-as it helps to define that culture-can only be fully understood through an objective and thorough analysis of all its elements.

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.

"The most learned, as well as the wittiest survey of human sexuality ever to be published." -New York Times

In The Naked Heart, Peter Gay explores the bourgeoisie's turn inward.

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.

It contains fifty-one key texts, spanning Freud's entire career from early case histories through his work on dreams, essays on sexuality, and on to his late writings, including Civilisation and Its Discontents. Peter Gay, a leading scholar of Freud, has put together this selection to provide a full portrait of Freud's thought.

'a writer of brilliant allusiveness and scintillating style - never better demonstrated than in this enormously enjoyable book.' John Keegan, The Sunday Times

The second volume of Peter Gay's in-depth study of the dawn of the modern world-the Age of Reason.