Pleasure Wars (Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Vol V) (Hardcover)

~ Peter Gay (Author) "In the Victorian decades, the name bourgeois was at once a term of reproach and a source of self-respect..." (more)
Key Phrases: pleasure wars, bourgeois experience, first collectors, United States, William Morris, First World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The final installment of Gay's multivolume study of the 19th-century bourgeois experience (e.g., Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, LJ 10/1/95) is a welcome addition to the literature. Current historical stereotypes of the bourgeois are rather flat, regarding them as either extremely confident or extremely insecure, depending on which authority is consulted. Gay's work systematically attempts to determine which is correct through an examination of their attitudes toward art, literature, and the concept we know as modernity. Throughout, Gay maintains that to view the bourgeoisie as stiff-necked and incapable of genuine affection or the enjoyment of pleasure is dangerously simplistic. In fact, the bourgeois experience was multidimensional, as were the bourgeois themselves. They were a revolutionary force, notes the author, whether they engaged in reactionary or modern crusades, and their ideas shaped the 20th century. An insightful and challenging book; recommended for general and specialized libraries.
-?Frederic Krome, Northern Kentucky Univ., Highland Heights
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

National Book Award winner and Freud biographer Gay, in the last volume of his five-part history of the Victorian era, disassociates bourgeois from tasteless and Victorian from prudish. He does so by analyzing art support, which shifted during that era from royal patronage to bourgeois demand. Businessmen associations from Munich to Manchester established museums and orchestras, and clerks demanded affordable reproductions of masterpieces. The wealthier collected art to mimic nobility; the poorer to ward off association with the lower classes. Gay notes that their lack was money, not taste: bourgeois collectors were the first to buy impressionists and modernists. Sometimes, his examples seem sketchy for academia or undigested for laypeople, and he never comments on social ills that still need addressing. But Gay does offer new facts, new sources, and new views about the Victorian age and its anxieties and new interpretations of Flaubert, Freud, Picasso, and others--all of which help present a fuller view of the bourgeois and the Victorian age. Kevin Grandfield

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 324 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1ST edition (January 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393045706
• ISBN-13: 978-0393045703
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,613,140 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars And Finally, the End, March 17, 2005

By	S. Pactor "reader" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This is book five of the five volume series. Yes, I have read them all. If I had to recommend two I would recommend the first volume(sex) and the third volume(agression).

I struggled with this volume, even though it is the shortest (240 pp.) by far of the five. Perhaps that's because the theme: bourgeois taste in art, was so dreadfully boring. There's not a single chapter I really enjoyed until the (last) chapter on the emergence of moderning. Or maybe that was because I was so close to the end.

So now I know plenty about the Victorian bourgeois. What can you say about them? That they defy easy categorization. But really, can't you say that about many subjects? Gay's focus on the journals of every day bourgeois as source material was fine, but over five volumes, I could have used some more "great men" and current events.