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Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks
By Peter Gay. ISBN 0-393-05118-8. From an Amazon reader " Peter Gay has taken three lectures and turned them into Savage Reprisals. Each of these essays looks at a different novel from the realist genre of the nineteenth century from three different countries; Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks. The essays are connected by the Peter Gay's examination of the usefulness of these books to historians and by the authors of these novels' anger against their society and the revenge they take against it within their novels. It is easy to see how these essays were brought to life as lectures but they work quite effectively as written works as well. This book will even be of interest to those who have not read the particular novels in question. The epilogue is the crowning achievment of the book and well worth the price of admission. A short, quick, fun spin through the world of novelists, historians and the nineteenth century."
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
2 people are currently reading
126 people want to read
About the author
Peter Gay
147 books147 followersPeter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 17, 2014
This is a lovely hardback book to hold and touch, with irregularly cut pages and splendid b&w prints at the beginning of each chapter. A disappearing luxury and rare physical pleasure in this advancing age of ebooks.
Peter Gay, whose original name—as Jan-Maat told me-- was Fröhlich, is also a joy to read.
In my academic growth I learnt to revere him and now, years later, I have felt it was time to pick up another of his books and see whether I felt a similar deference. Gay/Fröhlich as a cultural historian is known for his studies of the Enlightenment, of the Weimar Republic, and of Freud and the Victorian Age under a Freudian eye.
I have to admit that I have never been very interested in Freud (I probably share this with many other women) although I may not have approached him properly and I am probably being unfair. Related to this prejudice of mine (and please, do not try to psychoanalyze it) I also tend to get extremely bored by psychoanalytic approaches to novels, or by attempts to diagnose characters and/or authors. Gay’s Freudianism in this literary study is not formulaic nor reductionist. It remains very subtle, and therefore convincing.
Savage Reprisals (what a great title!) consists of three essays on three novels, together with a brilliant prologue and an excellent epilogue. The novels he has selected are Bleak House, Madame Bovary and Buddenbrooks. I have recently read the first and the third, and the second some years back.
In the prologue he identifies three possible values to be extracted out of reading a novel: One as approaching it as a source of civilized pleasures; the second as a didactic instrument for self improvement; and third and final, as a document that opens doors to its culture. He has chosen to focus on the latter, and this leads him to raise several issues related to the writing of history and to the writing of fiction. The forceful realist tradition he adroitly locates in all its international extension, that is, across France, Britain, France, US, Russia, Spain, Germany and Portugal, even if some countries were more precocious than others. In this extended and major Realist current, and he includes also the subgenre of historical fiction, he evaluates the capacity that literary Realism has to portray or represent the authenticity of a given society and the interest it thus raises for historians and fiction writers and or readers.
But it is really the concern of a modernist, Virginia Woolf, who stated that “the foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else”, that serves Gay to introduce his three analyses as samples of fiction that go “Beyond the Reality Principle”.
En each of the three studies, he examines how in these novels, while still embedded and securely placed in a carefully constructed social and political setting, the authors have chosen to dig deeper into their characters with a more engaged psychological analysis. He sees that these three books explore other aspects not normally found in pure realist fiction. One reviewer in this site has complained that there was no connection between the three essays. I disagree. Without going into detail in Gay’s analyses I will just provide what I think links them in his consideration.
In the essay The Angry Anarchist, Gay underlines how in Bleak House Dickens created, in what is still the most “realist” of the three samples, a rather artificial construction, in spite of its apparent mirroring of reality. In this composition, he wielded the portrayal of circumstances to adjust it to an overwrought setting, as well as fashioned his characters either as superhuman or as caricatures, thereby creating a sort of counterpoint that would bring forth his denouncement of a society that he found vicious and worryingly at fault.
The following essay, The Phobic Anatomist, presents a Madame Bovary in which Flaubert, in spite of the obsessive research with which he prepared his novels and all the meticulous minutiae, felt completely free to depart from pre-established frameworks. He flexed his literary powers to create his own rules and pursue his own version of truth. The result is an overstated Emma as a compressed and condensed psyche of discontent.
In the last essay, or The Mutinous Patrician, Gay plots how in his Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann waved between a realist depiction of the patriciate and an incisive and self-conscious psychological exploration of a few individuals. If Mann liked to vaunt that his Buddenbrooks had anticipated Max Weber and other scholarly sociological studies of a modern Buergertum, he also wrote to his brother Heinrich that “the whole thing is metaphysics, music and adolescent eroticism” in his new novel.
As we could expect, some psychoanalytic considerations are included in all three essays. With Dickens we read about the uneasiness he felt with women and this is explained by his resentment towards his mother and his impossible fascination with his sister in law. With Flaubert we are reminded of his correspondence with his muse Louise Colet and his parallel and periodic visits to whorehouses. And particularly with Mann, his sort of buried homosexuality, and the self-incriminating diaries he allowed to be published an established number of years after his death, are all very attractive aspects for a cultural scholar who has specialized on Freud.
If in his Prologue we saw that Gay introduced his studies on Beyond-Realism through the quote of a modernist, we then see him opening his Epilogue with another quote from another Modernist. Proust is presented as an exponent of the shifting interest on the source of reality in fiction. With him it is the inner being of an individual where his truthful world lies and which also makes history.
Peter Gay, whose original name—as Jan-Maat told me-- was Fröhlich, is also a joy to read.
In my academic growth I learnt to revere him and now, years later, I have felt it was time to pick up another of his books and see whether I felt a similar deference. Gay/Fröhlich as a cultural historian is known for his studies of the Enlightenment, of the Weimar Republic, and of Freud and the Victorian Age under a Freudian eye.
I have to admit that I have never been very interested in Freud (I probably share this with many other women) although I may not have approached him properly and I am probably being unfair. Related to this prejudice of mine (and please, do not try to psychoanalyze it) I also tend to get extremely bored by psychoanalytic approaches to novels, or by attempts to diagnose characters and/or authors. Gay’s Freudianism in this literary study is not formulaic nor reductionist. It remains very subtle, and therefore convincing.
Savage Reprisals (what a great title!) consists of three essays on three novels, together with a brilliant prologue and an excellent epilogue. The novels he has selected are Bleak House, Madame Bovary and Buddenbrooks. I have recently read the first and the third, and the second some years back.
In the prologue he identifies three possible values to be extracted out of reading a novel: One as approaching it as a source of civilized pleasures; the second as a didactic instrument for self improvement; and third and final, as a document that opens doors to its culture. He has chosen to focus on the latter, and this leads him to raise several issues related to the writing of history and to the writing of fiction. The forceful realist tradition he adroitly locates in all its international extension, that is, across France, Britain, France, US, Russia, Spain, Germany and Portugal, even if some countries were more precocious than others. In this extended and major Realist current, and he includes also the subgenre of historical fiction, he evaluates the capacity that literary Realism has to portray or represent the authenticity of a given society and the interest it thus raises for historians and fiction writers and or readers.
But it is really the concern of a modernist, Virginia Woolf, who stated that “the foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else”, that serves Gay to introduce his three analyses as samples of fiction that go “Beyond the Reality Principle”.
En each of the three studies, he examines how in these novels, while still embedded and securely placed in a carefully constructed social and political setting, the authors have chosen to dig deeper into their characters with a more engaged psychological analysis. He sees that these three books explore other aspects not normally found in pure realist fiction. One reviewer in this site has complained that there was no connection between the three essays. I disagree. Without going into detail in Gay’s analyses I will just provide what I think links them in his consideration.
In the essay The Angry Anarchist, Gay underlines how in Bleak House Dickens created, in what is still the most “realist” of the three samples, a rather artificial construction, in spite of its apparent mirroring of reality. In this composition, he wielded the portrayal of circumstances to adjust it to an overwrought setting, as well as fashioned his characters either as superhuman or as caricatures, thereby creating a sort of counterpoint that would bring forth his denouncement of a society that he found vicious and worryingly at fault.
The following essay, The Phobic Anatomist, presents a Madame Bovary in which Flaubert, in spite of the obsessive research with which he prepared his novels and all the meticulous minutiae, felt completely free to depart from pre-established frameworks. He flexed his literary powers to create his own rules and pursue his own version of truth. The result is an overstated Emma as a compressed and condensed psyche of discontent.
In the last essay, or The Mutinous Patrician, Gay plots how in his Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann waved between a realist depiction of the patriciate and an incisive and self-conscious psychological exploration of a few individuals. If Mann liked to vaunt that his Buddenbrooks had anticipated Max Weber and other scholarly sociological studies of a modern Buergertum, he also wrote to his brother Heinrich that “the whole thing is metaphysics, music and adolescent eroticism” in his new novel.
As we could expect, some psychoanalytic considerations are included in all three essays. With Dickens we read about the uneasiness he felt with women and this is explained by his resentment towards his mother and his impossible fascination with his sister in law. With Flaubert we are reminded of his correspondence with his muse Louise Colet and his parallel and periodic visits to whorehouses. And particularly with Mann, his sort of buried homosexuality, and the self-incriminating diaries he allowed to be published an established number of years after his death, are all very attractive aspects for a cultural scholar who has specialized on Freud.
If in his Prologue we saw that Gay introduced his studies on Beyond-Realism through the quote of a modernist, we then see him opening his Epilogue with another quote from another Modernist. Proust is presented as an exponent of the shifting interest on the source of reality in fiction. With him it is the inner being of an individual where his truthful world lies and which also makes history.
April 25, 2019
How useful this volume of essays will be to you will depend upon how much you already know about the three authors it covers: as I know precious little about the lives and careers of Mann and Flaubert, I found the final two essays to be insightful, fascinating even. But I have read my fair share of secondary literature on Dickens, and so the first essay on Bleak House didn't do that much for me, and certainly did not add much to the pile of scholarship out there on his work. And so I am led to believe/infer that the Flaubert and Mann essays don't either, but who knows? I enjoyed reading them anyhow, and so if like me you have read the novels but not much else, this book will be just the ticket to spur you into wider reading on their work. 3.5*
June 30, 2013
This book is made basically of 3 essays based on the literary criticism of 3 unforgettable novels, as below:
The Angry Anarchist: Charles Dickens in Bleak House.
The Phobic Anatomist: Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary.
The Multinous Patrician: Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks.
Page 17:
In fact, it is fair to say that well into the twentieth century, novelists across Europe and the United States were firmly committed to the Reality Principle.
Page 20:
The Realist novel cuts the world apart and put it together again in distinctive ways...they profess that the world they are constructing is authentic.
Page 21:
To be sure, there is more than one way of reading a novel: as a source of civilized pleasures, as a didactic instrument serving self-improvement, as a document opening doors to its culture.
Despite the effort made by the author, the analyses of the 3 novels covered by this book are fairly connected in such way that you may read each session without reading the previous or the following ones.
The Angry Anarchist: Charles Dickens in Bleak House.
The Phobic Anatomist: Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary.
The Multinous Patrician: Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks.
Page 17:
In fact, it is fair to say that well into the twentieth century, novelists across Europe and the United States were firmly committed to the Reality Principle.
Page 20:
The Realist novel cuts the world apart and put it together again in distinctive ways...they profess that the world they are constructing is authentic.
Page 21:
To be sure, there is more than one way of reading a novel: as a source of civilized pleasures, as a didactic instrument serving self-improvement, as a document opening doors to its culture.
Despite the effort made by the author, the analyses of the 3 novels covered by this book are fairly connected in such way that you may read each session without reading the previous or the following ones.
November 1, 2011
Muito interessante a análise do autor, principalmente sobre Thomas Mann. Ele mostra como a personalidade do autor, detalhes de sua vida privada e do contexto histórico em que viveu, reverberam em sua obra e a transformam em valiosa fonte documental para pesquisadores, desafiando, de certa forma, as estritas fronteiras que costumam separar arte e ciência.
September 1, 2021
Tänkvärt - kultur- och idéhistoriskt. För Peter Gay är kulturhistoriker. Så detta är inte en djuplodad närläsning av Dickens, Flaubert och Mann, utan en kort betraktelse över påståendet att romaner kan vara Realism och Historia, likaväl som misstanken att alla historiker är subjektiva, och därför aldrig finner 'the whole truth and nothing but the truth'.
Självklart är historiker idag ett skrå välutbildat vad gäller 'objektivitet', samtididgt som alla teser väljer en viss utgångspunkt. Vilket också i allmänhet öppet deklareras. Det är ju idén med modern historievetenskap. Fiktion, romaner, kan kallas realism men ändå vara en tes - medveten eller omedveten - hos författaren. Skickliga författare kan få en subjektiv karaktär, en idiosynkratisk individ, som ändå får läsaren att känna igen sig, få det lilla att kännas generellt allmängiltigt.
Själv läser jag romaner mer med tanke på utgivningsåret - och vad det säger om den tid romanen tillkom i - än på vilken tid de säger sig behandla. Just för den kulturhistoriska inblick det ger.
Självklart är historiker idag ett skrå välutbildat vad gäller 'objektivitet', samtididgt som alla teser väljer en viss utgångspunkt. Vilket också i allmänhet öppet deklareras. Det är ju idén med modern historievetenskap. Fiktion, romaner, kan kallas realism men ändå vara en tes - medveten eller omedveten - hos författaren. Skickliga författare kan få en subjektiv karaktär, en idiosynkratisk individ, som ändå får läsaren att känna igen sig, få det lilla att kännas generellt allmängiltigt.
Själv läser jag romaner mer med tanke på utgivningsåret - och vad det säger om den tid romanen tillkom i - än på vilken tid de säger sig behandla. Just för den kulturhistoriska inblick det ger.
September 18, 2012
Expected more insights from a book that deals with Bleak House, Mme Bovary and Buddenbrooks. Seemed like 3 separate essays without a common thread.
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April 20, 2014Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews