F. Scott Fitzgerald's Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: July 10, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 212
ISBN-13: 9781403976710
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -; 20th Century American Literature; Ethnic Groups In Literature; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; USA; American - General; Literary Criticism & Collections / American; Ethnic Studies - General; Popular Culture - General; Literature and history; National characteristics, American, in literature; Race in literature; United States
Description: "This book charts Fitzgerald's use of racial stereotypes to encode the dual nature of his literary ambition: his desire to be on the one hand a popular American entertainer, and on the other to make his mark among the elite members of an international literary field. Taking his cue from some under-appreciated stories, Michael Nowlin argues that Fitzgerald's early use of tropes from blackface minstrelsy anticipated his race-inflected treatment of divided artist figures in the major novels from The Beautiful and Damned to the unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon. At issue in all these novels, both formally and thematically, is the dynamic state of the modern, multi-faceted, and ethnically diverse American cultural field Fitzgerald was constantly re-negotiating in order to meet his goal of long-term literary success."--book jacket.