Description
Book SynopsisIrwin seamlessly ties together details from Fitzgerald's life with elements from his entire body of work and considers central themes connected to wealth, class, work, love, jazz, acceptance, family, disillusionment, and life as theatrical performance.
Trade ReviewThis volume is an example of what happens when an expert takes a career's worth of teaching and study and elegantly applies it to a subject he loves. John Irwin... wastes nary a word in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction considering Fitzgerald's life and what makes his stories so poetically heartbreaking. A must for Fitzgerald fans, and an enthusiastic push for those who've only read Gatsby once to explore the entire oeuvre. -- Brett McCabe Johns Hopkins Magazine This is a luminous, eye-opening, deeply appreciative study about the writings of Fitzgerald, as opposed to yet another chronicle of his high life and hard times... Indeed, this is precisely the kind of book that's long overdue. -- M.J. Moore Neworld Review Readers will find that [ F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction] offers discerning analysis... deserving attention is Irwin's argument about the influence of music, particularly jazz, on Fitzgerald. Finally, treatment of "the mythical method" is revealing, considering that mythopoetic readers of literature are all but moribund. Remarkably, this book does not rehash previous close readings but incorporates the best of such criticisms. Choice It is a testament to both the author's brilliance and the scrupulousness of his focus and approach that the book delivers on every conceivable level... Simply stated, now that "An Almost Theatrical Innocence" has arrive, we can agree that it was well worth the wait. -- Kirk Curnutt The F Scott Fitzgerald Review John T. Irwin's F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction is a brave attempt... to give Fitzgerald the kind of resolutely non-fan-magazine scrutiny that Irwin has previously given to Hart Crane and Poe. he says some smart things about Fitzgerald's imagery--about, for instance, how ambiguous the idea of light is in his writing, so that the green light at the end of the dock is a protent of the shining illusory screen of the movies, standing for persistent illusion as much as romantic aspiration. -- Adam Gopnik The New Yorker
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
1. Compensating Visions in The Great Gatsby
2. Fitzgerald as a Southern Writer
3. The Importance of "Repose"
4. "An Almost Theatrical Innocence"
5. Fitzgerald and the Mythical Method
6. On the Son's Own Terms
Works Cited
Index
