Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis explores the role of 1920s and 1930s popular culture in the short stories of F.\nScott Fitzgerald. My original contribution to knowledge is to show how Fitzgerald’s use\nof dance, music, and film - at the level of both form and content - impact upon his\nliterary aesthetics. By situating Fitzgerald’s work in the context of the short story as a\ngenre, I consider the modernist features of his short fiction in relation to short-story\ncycles by James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway. I argue that\nFitzgerald’s lyrical style can be deceptive, and his stories are often more experimental,\neven subversive, than often recognised. This thesis argues that it is in Fitzgerald’s subtle\nuse of ambiguity and parody that these experimental aspects of his fiction often\nmanifest themselves. Reading the short fiction with a view to elucidating this parodic\nmode, and thus exploring Fitzgerald’s social and cultural critique, we encounter\nFitzgerald parodying both his own fictive traits and his earlier stories, which sheds new\nlight on his frequently disdainful remarks about the value of his magazine fiction. As\nambiguity and parody are key features of African American cultural practices of the\nperiod, the thesis also re-examines Fitzgerald’s engagement with primitivist modernism,\noffering a broader perspective on how he navigated between his roles as literary\nnovelist and popular short-storyist. Popular cultural references in Fitzgerald’s short\nfiction do not simply serve as temporal markers or to provide scenic tone, but often\nfunction subversively, to destabilise our expectations of a commercial Fitzgerald story\nwhilst sitting in tension with Fitzgerald’s lyrical prose style. Themes of disguise and\nidentity are of paramount importance to Fitzgerald’s literary modernism, and his use of\nthese cultural media, centred around the concept of performance and leisure, show\nFitzgerald subtly subverting our expectations of his short fiction.
Author: Jade Broughton Adams
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2258955501