Overview

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.

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9780393319040

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Reviews

Gay's monumental five-volume study of the European and American middle classes between 1820 and 1914 is now available in modestly priced paperbacks. Few historians have the erudition necessary to undertake such a huge survey as this but Professor Gay is conspicuously one of them. The result is both a panorama and an intimate exploration of the psyche of three generations of the professional and mercantile people of the West. In the first of his volumes he examines 19th-century attitudes towards sexuality. Here the award-winning biographer of Freud brings valuable psychoanalytic insights to the mass of contemporary sources which he has sifted and he reveals that the Victorians were not quite as repressed as we like to think. In the succeeding volume Gay turns his attention to ideal and real notions of love among the bourgeoisie. Here again he shows that our ancestors were not so different from us in some respects, despite the fact that contemporary social values conditioned them to different expectations and experiences in others. A fascinating insight into the mind of the age. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Peter Gay (1923—2015) was the author of more than twenty-five books, including the National Book Award winner The Enlightenment, the best-selling Weimar Culture, and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time.

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