Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In this book, the distinguished historian Carl Schorske--author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fin-de-Siécle Vienna --draws together a series of essays that reveal the changing place of history in nineteenth-and twentieth-century cultures. In most intellectual and artistic fields, Schorske argues, twentieth-century Europeans and Americans have come to do their thinking without history. Modern art, modern architecture, modern music, modern science--all have defined themselves not as emerging from or even reacting against the past, but as detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space. This is in stark contrast to the historicism of the nineteenth century, he argues, when ideas about the past pervaded most fields of thought from philosophy and politics to art, music, and literature. However, Schorske also shows that the nineteenth century's attachment to thinking with history and the modernist way of thinking without history are more than just antitheses. They are different ways of trying to address the problems of modernity, to give shape and meaning to European civilization in the era of industrial capitalism and mass politics.

Schorske begins by reflecting on his own vocation as it was shaped by the historical changes he has seen sweep across political and academic culture. Then he offers a European sampler of ways in which nineteenth-century European intellectuals used conceptions of the past to address the problems of their day: the city as community and artifact; the function of art; social dislocation. Narrowing his focus to Fin-de-Siécle Vienna in a second group of essays, he analyzes the emergence of ahistorical modernism in that city. Against the background of Austria's persistent, conflicting Baroque and Enlightenment traditions, Schorske examines three Viennese pioneers of modernism--Adolf Loos, Gustav Mahler, and Sigmund Freud--as they sought new orientation in their fields.

In a concluding essay, Schorske turns his attention to thinking about history. In the context of a postmodern culture, when other disciplines that had once abandoned history are discovering new uses for it, he reflects on the nature and limits of history for the study of culture.

Originally published in 1998.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations
• Permissions and Credits
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Book: Theme and Content (p. 3)
• 2 The Author: Encountering History (p. 17)
• Pt. 1 Clio Ascendant: Historicist Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Europe
• 3 The Idea of the City in European Thought: Voltaire to Spengler (p. 37)
• 4 History as Vocation in Burckhardt's Basel (p. 56)
• 5 Medieval Revival and Its Modern Content: Coleridge, Pugin, and Disraeli (p. 71)
• 6 The Quest for the Grail: Wagner and Morris (p. 90)
• 7 Museum in Contested Space: The Sword, the Scepter, and the Ring (p. 105)
• Pt. 2 Clio Eclipsed: Toward Modernism in Vienna
• 8 Grace and the Word: Austria's Two Cultures and Their Modern Fate (p. 125)
• 9 Generational Tension and Cultural Change (p. 141)
• 10 From Public Scene to Private Space: Architecture as Culture Criticism (p. 157)
• 11 Gustav Mahler: Formation and Transformation (p. 172)
• 12 To the Egyptian Dig: Freud's Psycho-Archeology of Cultures (p. 191)
• 13 History and the Study of Culture (p. 219)
• Index (p. 233)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Thirteen pieces by a first-rate scholar on diverse aspects of the intellectual and cultural history of western and central Europe, mainly from 1848 to 1914. Schorske, author of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and other works, has three foci: his own evolution as a historian and his impressively open response to the ``new history'' that has emerged during the past three decades; perceptions of, and design battles over, the modern city; and the early, formative years of modernist culture. Two of his most interesting pieces focus on the architectural shaping of the Ringstrasse, the grand boulevard that encircled the heart of post-1848 Vienna. Its magisterial buildings, Schorske says, largely reflected the values of both those loyal to Kaiser Franz Josef and those committed to a more liberal, though hardly fully democratic, state; both tendencies would be sharply criticized beginning around 1890 by such modernist intellectuals as the architect Adolf Loos and the journalist and playwright Karl Kraus. Only three of Schorske's essays focus on one or more individualsŽthe English writer and utopian visionary William Morris, Wagner, Mahler, and FreudŽbut these are among the book's best. Concerning the latter, Schorske traces FreudŽs deep interest in the culture of ancient Egypt, as evidenced in his last major work, Moses and Monotheism, by first looking at the influence and mystique that three great western European cities (London, Paris, and Rome) played in Freud's thought. Schorske is a very gifted writer and scholar, usually clearly and succinctly distilling his study of a great deal of material from many disciplines, avoiding historical and intellectual minutiae, and incorporating colorful anecdotes and quotes (for example, Baudelaire on the pleasure of ``bathing himself in the [urban] crowd''). A pleasurable and stimulating read.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Carl Emil Schorske was born in the Bronx, New York on March 15, 1915. He received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a master's degree from Harvard University before serving in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. After the war, he returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. He taught at several universities including the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and Wesleyan University. In 1966, he was one of 10 "great teachers" pictured on the cover of Time magazine.

He wrote several books during his lifetime including Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, and Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. In 1981, he received the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and was among the first class of recipients of a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius award. He died on September 13, 2015 at the age of 100.

(Bowker Author Biography)