Schnitzler´s Century. The making of middle-class culture 1815-191

Why Schnitzler? Although he was hardly the archetypal bourgeois citizen of his cultural society, Schnitzler was, as Gay comments in his preface, ´´endowed with qualities that make him a credible and resourceful witness to the middle-class world,´´ whose emergence Gay so dramatically chronicles. Thus, Schnitzler becomes ´´a kind of master of ceremonies´´, an historical figure whose problñematic parental relationship, sexual obsessions, much-catalogued romances, and troubling neuroses serce as the impetus to broader investigations of nineteenth-century history.