The Great Gatsby

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Broadview Press, Mar 26, 2007 - Fiction - 258 pages

The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of American fiction. It tells of the mysterious Jay Gatsby’s grand effort to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, the rich girl who embodies for him the promise of the American dream. Deeply romantic in its concern with self-making, ideal love, and the power of illusion, it draws on modernist techniques to capture the spirit of the materialistic, morally adrift, post-war era Fitzgerald dubbed “the jazz age.” Gatsby’s aspirations remain inseparable from the rhythms and possibilities suggested by modern consumer culture, popular song, the movies; his obstacles inseparable from contemporary American anxieties about social mobility, racial mongrelization, and the fate of Western civilization.

This Broadview edition sets the novel in context by providing readers with a critical introduction and crucial background material about the consumer culture in which Fitzgerald was immersed; about the spirit of the jazz age; and about racial discourse in the 1920s.

 

Contents

Acknowledgements
7
Introduction
9
A Brief Chronology
35
A Note on the Text
41
The Great Gatsby
45
Fitzgeralds Correspondence about The Great Gatsby
177
Contemporary Reviews
195
Consumption Class and Selfhood Eight Contemporary Advertisements
209
The Irreverent Spirit of the Jazz Age
219
Race and the National Culture 192025
237
Select Bibliography
253
Copyright

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About the author (2007)

Michael Nowlin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness (2007) and editor of the Broadview edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (2002).

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