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How and why Fitzgerald's novel, initially called a failure, has
come to be considered a masterwork of American literature and part
of the fabric of the culture. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is
widely seen as the quintessential "great American novel," and the
extensive body of criticism on the work bears out its significance
in American letters. American Icon traces its reception and its
canonical status in American literature, popular culture, and
educational experience. It begins by outlining the novel's critical
reception from its publication in 1925, to very mixed reviews,
through Fitzgerald's death, when it had been virtually forgotten.
Next, it examines the posthumous revival of Fitzgerald studies in
the 1940s and its intensification by the New Critics in the 1950s,
focusing on how and why the novel began to be considered a
masterpiece of American literature. It then traces the growth of
the "industry" of Gatsby criticism in the ensuing decades,
stressing how critics of recent decades have opened up study of the
economic, sexual, racial,and historical aspects of the text. The
final section discusses the larger-than-life status Gatsby has
attained in American education and popular culture, suggesting that
it has not only risen from the critical ash heaps into which it was
initially discarded, but also that it has become part of the fabric
of American culture in a way that few other works have. Robert
Beuka is Professor of English at Bronx Community College, City
University of New York.
The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise explores resonances of
"Southernness" in works by American culture's leading literary
couple. At the height of their fame, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
dramatized their relationship as a romance of regionalism, as the
charming tale of a Northern man wooing a Southern belle. Their
writing exposes deeper sectional conflicts, however: from the
seemingly unexorcisable fixation with the Civil War and the
historical revisionism of the Lost Cause to popular culture's
depiction of the South as an artistically deprived, economically
broken backwater, the couple challenged early twentieth-century
stereotypes of life below the Mason-Dixon line. From their most
famous efforts (The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz) to their
more overlooked and obscure (Scott's 1932 story "Family in the
Wind," Zelda's "The Iceberg," published in 1918 before she even met
her husband), Scott and Zelda returned obsessively to the
challenges of defining Southern identity in a country in which
"going south" meant decay and dissolution. Contributors to this
volume tackle a range of Southern topics, including belle culture,
the picturesque and the Gothic, Confederate commemoration and race
relations, and regional reconciliation. As the collection
demonstrates, the Fitzgeralds' fortuitous meeting in Montgomery,
Alabama, in 1918 sparked a Southern renascence in miniature.
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