Pleasure Wars (Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud/Peter Gay, Vol 5)

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And Finally, the End

Pleasure Wars (Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud/Peter Gay, Vol 5)
Peter Gay
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

19th Century | World | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Pleasure Wars is the fifth and final volume in The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Peter Gay's searching inquiry into the ideas and sensibilities that dominated nineteenth-century culture. Richard Sennett, referring to the series as a whole, wrote that Peter Gay's "magisterial portrait of the Victorian bourgeoisie makes the past make emotional sense."

In August 1934, young Cyril L. wrote to his friend Billy about all the exciting men he had met, the swinging nightclubs he had visited, and the vibrant new life he had forged for himself in the big city. He wrote, "I have only been queer since I came to London about two years ago, before then I knew nothing about it." London, for Cyril, meant boundless opportunities to explore his newfound sexuality. But his freedom was limite: he was soon arrested, simply for being in a club frequented by queer men.

Cyril's story is Matt Houlbrook's point of entry into the queer worlds of early twentieth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown sources, from police reports and newspaper exposés to personal letters, diaries, and the first queer guidebook ever written, Houlbrook here explores the relationship between queer sexualities and modern urban culture that we take for granted today. He revisits the diverse queer lives that took hold in London's parks and streets; its restaurants, pubs, and dancehalls; and its Turkish bathhouses and hotels—as well as attempts by municipal authorities to control and crack down on those worlds. He also describes how London shaped the culture and politics of queer life—and how London was in turn shaped by the lives of queer men. Ultimately, Houlbrook unveils the complex ways in which men made sense of their desires and who they were. In so doing, he mounts a sustained challenge to conventional understandings of the city as a place of sexual liberation and a unified queer culture.

A history remarkable in its complexity yet intimate in its portraiture, Queer London is a landmark work that redefines queer urban life in England and beyond.

“A ground-breaking work. While middle-class lives and writing have tended to compel the attention of most historians of homosexuality, Matt Houlbrook has looked more widely and found a rich seam of new evidence. It has allowed him to construct a complex, compelling account of interwar sexualities and to map a new, intimate geography of London.”—Matt Cook, The Times Higher Education Supplement

Winner of History Today’s Book of the Year Award, 2006

Offers a fresh exploration of a major American artistic movement
Features works by the Ashcan artists and their circle, including George Bellows (see opposite), William Glackens, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, George Luks, Guy PÃ¨ne du Bois, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn and John Sloan, among others
Complemented by lively essays on the world of leisure experienced and depicted by the Ashcan school.

Placing military history within the context of colonial and revolutionary historiography, Carp finds that the colonial American belief that authority and political power should be decentralized deeply influenced Congress's approach to the task of supplying the army. Furthermore, most Congressmen had neither military experience nor any idea of how to administer an army, while local governments constantly thwarted the army's efforts to obtain supplies—they blocked impressment and interfered with the movement of food and clothing.

Carp shows that political leaders eventually adjusted their ideals to the imperatives of winning the war. He offers a revisionist analysis of the origins of the Nationalist movement of 1780-83 that was begun by army officers and state legislators fearing the imminent failure of the Revolution. Lacking unity and blinded by republican ideology, the Nationalists did not markedly improve the administration of the army. Instead, it was largely through the efforts of Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, the cooperation of the French, and sheer luck that the British were ultimately defeated. Carp concludes that the Americans won the Revolution "in spite of, rather than because of, their political beliefs."

The first issue in a solid comic book adaptation of the first Anita Blake novel.......2007-05-01