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Professor Neubauer strengthens in Fin de Siècle: The Culture of Adolescence, through numerous examples, a long-held assumption that adolescence, the stage of life between pubescence and adulthood, is myth, merely a social invention (Ariès, 1962). At the same time, he informs us that this powerful time of growing up is far more than what the inventors meant it to be. In this collage of representations and ideas, Neubauer weaves together some major players from the turn of the 19th century. To give the reader an idea of his exhaustive survey, those whom he particularizes include, in literature, Lou Andreas-Salome, Andre Gide, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, and Thomas Mann; in art, Edvard Munch, Fritz Bleyl, and other Brücke artists, Oskar Kokoschka and George Minne; in psychology, Charlotte Bühler, Granville Stanley Hall, and Eduard Spranger; in psychoanalysis, Karl Abraham, Sigmund Freud, and Karen Homey; and in the youth movement, Robert S. S. Baden-Powell, Karl Fischer, and Alfred de Tarde.
There are some important exclusions. For example, he forgoes discussion of the female adolescent in literature, devotes but a half-page to Shakespeare's view of adolescence, gives short shrift to D. H. Lawrence and Dostoevski and ignores Jung, Adler, and other principals of the psychoanalytic movement. Nevertheless, extremely valuable are the careful and complete references, notes and appendices provided. Those who lecture or engage in scholarly writings and research on adolescence will appreciate the rich source material and stimulating anecdotes.
The synthesis achieved informs us that art, literature and the like do not merely reflect culture, but they influence it as well. Therefore, once adolescence is described by the literati, it becomes similarly enacted. In