Preface
The Great Gatsby is the symbol of Fitzgerald’s greatness. Although it was treated indifferently when it was published, it had gained its fame gradually by 1960s. Finally, it was recognized as the most important work in the Jazz Age. In the past, there were lots of pieces of writing on The Great Gatsby. For example, The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas, by Ronald Bergman, focused on Fitzgerald and the prevailing conception and value, demonstrating that how they influenced the dialect of those characters, and how the story developed. Another example is F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby, edited by Nicolas Tredell, which was a reader’s guide. The extracts and essays included here illustrated that The Great Gatsby was the …show more content…
And the extracts and essays, ranging from the 1920s to the 1980s, focused mainly on psychological analysis, structuralism, feminism, post-modernism, gender analysis and cultural analysis. Even the analysis of conflicts among different social classes and the analysis of racial problem can be found in this book. Besides these pieces of critiques, there are a great number of guide books for The Great Gatsby, such as Dictionary of literary Biography, Vol. 219: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby - A Documentary Volume by Matthew J. Bruccoli, which offers us a list of considerable indexes for The Great Gatsby. Understanding the Great Gatsby: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents by Dalton Gross included a wide variety of documents in the 1920s, ranging from newspaper stories, first person accounts to congressional testimony of the scandals. Periodicals and research papers on The Great Gatsby are unaccountable. Still, I have classified them into several groups from different points of view. Firstly, this book has suggested …show more content…
As the representative of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald, presenting American life and American people in the twenties in his writings, set up the moral trend. Therefore, the discussion on morality remains heated. And many scholars related it to the disillusionment of American Dream. In recent years, Consumer Culture from The Great Gatsby has surfaced. Feminism is the second dimension of this book. Fitzgerald not only named the twenties as the Jazz Age, but named fashionable women at that time as “flapper”, which offers scholars a sally port to dig deeper into this book. A dominant perspective in this field is that those flappers tried to rebel the Victorian morality, but their personal dreams were disillusioned due to the conflicts between their romantic vision of life and harsh reality, then they went back to traditional lifestyle. Third, narrative pattern plays an important role in this novel. R.W Stallman wrote a research paper “Gatsby and the Hole Time”, in which the relation between disillusionment of American Dream and time sequence in The Great Gatsby was discussed. Wayne C. Booth coined the term, unreliable narrator, in his work The Rhetoric of Fiction, while Dr. T. J. Eckleburg affirmed the reliability on the narrator of this novel – Nick
The Great Gatsby is the symbol of Fitzgerald’s greatness. Although it was treated indifferently when it was published, it had gained its fame gradually by 1960s. Finally, it was recognized as the most important work in the Jazz Age. In the past, there were lots of pieces of writing on The Great Gatsby. For example, The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas, by Ronald Bergman, focused on Fitzgerald and the prevailing conception and value, demonstrating that how they influenced the dialect of those characters, and how the story developed. Another example is F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby, edited by Nicolas Tredell, which was a reader’s guide. The extracts and essays included here illustrated that The Great Gatsby was the …show more content…
And the extracts and essays, ranging from the 1920s to the 1980s, focused mainly on psychological analysis, structuralism, feminism, post-modernism, gender analysis and cultural analysis. Even the analysis of conflicts among different social classes and the analysis of racial problem can be found in this book. Besides these pieces of critiques, there are a great number of guide books for The Great Gatsby, such as Dictionary of literary Biography, Vol. 219: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby - A Documentary Volume by Matthew J. Bruccoli, which offers us a list of considerable indexes for The Great Gatsby. Understanding the Great Gatsby: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents by Dalton Gross included a wide variety of documents in the 1920s, ranging from newspaper stories, first person accounts to congressional testimony of the scandals. Periodicals and research papers on The Great Gatsby are unaccountable. Still, I have classified them into several groups from different points of view. Firstly, this book has suggested …show more content…
As the representative of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald, presenting American life and American people in the twenties in his writings, set up the moral trend. Therefore, the discussion on morality remains heated. And many scholars related it to the disillusionment of American Dream. In recent years, Consumer Culture from The Great Gatsby has surfaced. Feminism is the second dimension of this book. Fitzgerald not only named the twenties as the Jazz Age, but named fashionable women at that time as “flapper”, which offers scholars a sally port to dig deeper into this book. A dominant perspective in this field is that those flappers tried to rebel the Victorian morality, but their personal dreams were disillusioned due to the conflicts between their romantic vision of life and harsh reality, then they went back to traditional lifestyle. Third, narrative pattern plays an important role in this novel. R.W Stallman wrote a research paper “Gatsby and the Hole Time”, in which the relation between disillusionment of American Dream and time sequence in The Great Gatsby was discussed. Wayne C. Booth coined the term, unreliable narrator, in his work The Rhetoric of Fiction, while Dr. T. J. Eckleburg affirmed the reliability on the narrator of this novel – Nick