Exploring Fitzgerald's parabolic imagery of home, bars, schools, city, and Hollywood, Zhang analyzes an essential, but relatively uncultivated part of the artistry in Fitzgerald's fiction.
Most of Fitzgerald's novels and stories start as a romance of love or a fantasy of extravagant glamour, but as the settings and the interplay between characters and the places they live are carefully examined, an emblem-like quality is discovered in their deceptively simple configuration. The first full-length study of Fitzgerald's unparalleled representation of Jazz Age America, this book analyzes an essential, but relatively uncultivated part of the artistry in Fitzgerald's fiction: his use of domestic and urban settings. Fitzgerald's use of these settings as a rich source of imagery objectifies social trends and individual desires. Each setting is no longer just a locale, or a site for a story's action, but a sophisticated device, an integral part of the story designed to convey a unique vision of life in a profound way. Such parabolic quality, the author argues, gives Fitzgerald's fiction enormous possibilities of temporal span and multiple situations, as well as a microcosmic capacity for containing the complexities of reality.
Abbreviations
Introduction
Home: A Showcase of Human Experience
Bars: Windows of Society
Schools: Cradles of the Elite
City: A Land of Glamour and Despair
Hollywood: A World of Art, Business, and Rivalry
Bibliography
Index
