The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence by John Neubauer New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1992,  xv + 288 pp., $30.00

As we approach the end of the 20th century, The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence explores the nature of adolescence, the years from 12 or 13 to 18 or 20, as it was described and experienced in Western Europe and America in the decades around the end of the 19th century. This is a very erudite and wide-ranging study that examines the representations of adolescents in the literature, visual arts, psychology, and psychoanalytic writing of this era.

Neubauer proposes that the concept of adolescence as a distinct life-cycle stage became fully developed in the decades around 1900. This is apparent, he argues, not only because the term itself was not widely used earlier but, more important, because it was a time in which interlocking discourses about adolescence emerged in literature, psychology, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, sociology, and criminal justice. This volume explores these interlocking discourses to demonstrate how human development was perceived in terms of a new category by the end of the 19th century.

The first five of the eleven chapters in the book focus on the portrayal of adolescents in fin-de-siècle literature. Chapters 1 and 2 explore how narrative forms were used to deal with problems of adolescent identity, while chapters 3 and 4 deal with the social context of the individual, the representation of adolescent groups and spaces in literature. Chapter 5 closes the literary part of the book by considering the social context of literary institutions; the issues of genre history and the reading public are explored.

The literary section of the book is not light reading. It has important points to make that are fundamental to the overall themes of the volume, and these themes are developed clearly and at some length. The entire literary portion of the book will be most appealing to readers with an interest in comparative literature and some background in the discipline.