Description
Book SynopsisIn this fascinating study, Chris Messenger posits F. Scott Fitzgerald as a great master of sentiment in modern American fiction. Sentimental forms both attracted and repelled Fitzgerald while defining his deepest nature in prose. Messenger demonstrates that the sentimental identities, refractions, and influences Fitzgerald explores in Tender Is the Night define key components in his affective life that evolved into a powerful aesthetic, which underwrote his stature as a major novelist. In Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities, Messenger traces the roots of Fitzgerald's writing career to the deaths of his two infant sisters, a few months before his own birth. It was their loss, Fitzgerald wrote, that made him a writer. Messenger highlights how the loss of his siblings powerfully molded his writer's relation to maternal nurturing and sympathy as well as shaped the homosocial intimations visible in the care-giving protagonist of Tender Is the Night, psychi
