Download or read book The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud written by Peter Gay and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1996-10-17 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Naked Heart, Peter Gay explores the bourgeoisie's turn inward. At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport." Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age.