American Icon: Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context

174 Pages·2011·1.03 MB·English

by  Robert Beuka

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is widely seen as the quintessential A
“great American novel,” and the extensive body of criticism on the
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work bears out its significance in American letters. American Icon
traces its reception and its canonical status in American literature, e AmericAn icon
popular culture, and educational experience. It begins by outlining the r
novel’s critical reception from its publication in 1925, to very mixed
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reviews, through Fitzgerald’s death, when it had been virtually forgotten. c
Next, it examines the posthumous revival of Fitzgerald studies in the
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1940s and its intensification by the New Critics in the 1950s, focusing Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context
on how and why the novel began to be considered a masterpiece n
of American literature. It then traces the growth of the “industry” of

Gatsby criticism in the ensuing decades, stressing how critics of recent i
decades have opened up study of the economic, sexual, racial, and c
historical aspects of the text. The final section discusses the larger-than- o
life status Gatsby has attained in American education and popular
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culture, suggesting not only that it has risen from the critical ash heaps
into which it was initially discarded, but also that it has become part of
the fabric of American culture in a way that few other works have. i F
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robert beukA is Professor of English at Bronx Community College, iti er
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City University of New York. al a ld’s
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“Robert Beuka has constructed an immensely valuable resource for C e

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teachers, students, and scholars. We have needed a book like this for a lt r
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long time; Gatsby criticism seems in little danger of exhaustion anytime r a
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soon, and it becomes extremely difficult for readers to organize extant l G
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criticism simply because it’s so vast. This book will be read and reread, o a
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annotated and underlined, for many years to come.” t b
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—Kirk Curnutt, Troy University Montgomery t
“American Icon is a terrific book. . . . Professor Beuka has made sense
of decades of fragmented insights.”
—Ronald Berman, University of California, San Diego
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Cover image: Dust jacket of first edition of The Great Gatsby, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1925. The
image is Francis Cugat’s Celestial Eyes. Photo used by kind permission of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli k
Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South A
Carolina Libraries.
Cover design: Frank Gutbrod
robert beukA
Beuka_cover.indd 1 8/8/11 6:15:51 PM
American Icon
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Studies in American Literature and Culture:
Literary Criticism in Perspective
Scott Peeples, Series Editor
(Charleston, South Carolina)
About Literary Criticism in Perspective
Books in the series Literary Criticism in Perspective trace liter-
ary scholarship and criticism on major and neglected writers
alike, or on a single major work, a group of writers, a literary
school or movement. In so doing the authors  — authorities
on the topic in question who are also well-versed in the prin-
ciples and history of literary criticism  — address a readership
consisting of scholars, students of literature at the graduate
and undergraduate level, and the general reader. One of the
primary purposes of the series is to illuminate the nature of
literary criticism itself, to gauge the influence of social and his-
toric currents on aesthetic judgments once thought objective
and normative.
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American Icon
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in
Critical and Cultural Context
Robert Beuka
Rochester, New York
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Copyright © 2011 Robert Beuka
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2011
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-371-7
ISBN-10: 1-57113-371-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beuka, Robert, 1965–
American icon: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in critical and cultural
context / Robert Beuka.
p. cm. — (Studies in American literature and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-371-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
ISBN-10: 1-57113-371-2 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. Great Gatsby. I. Title.
II. Series.
PS3511.I9G8243 2011
813'.52—dc22
2011020005
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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For my mother and father
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Contents
Preface ix
1: A Book of the Season Only: Early Reactions to
The Great Gatsby 1
2: A Green Light: The “Fitzgerald Revival” and the
Making of a Masterpiece, 1940–59 22
3: The Gatsby Industry: Tracing Patterns and Pushing
Boundaries in the Criticism of the Sixties and Seventies 57
4: Gatsby, in Theory (and Out): New Paradigms in the
Eighties and Nineties 93
5: Twenty-First-Century G: The Great Gatsby as Cultural Icon 118
Works Cited 143
Index 157
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Preface
ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES of working on this book has been discov-
ering the very wide range of opinion and reaction that Fitzgerald’s
classic 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, has generated through the years.
Beyond the expected debate in the scholarly journals, I found through my
research how deep and varied the book’s influence has been on American
popular culture and discourse as well. In this regard, the study that fol-
lows at times diverges somewhat from the strict focus on analyzing trends
and ideas in academic scholarship that is characteristic of the Literary
Criticism in Perspective series. While my primary object of study is indeed
the formal scholarship on Gatsby, to do justice to the profound cultural
impact of this novel, I found it necessary — and rather enjoyable! — to
look occasionally beyond the realm of scholarly books and journals, into
the world of popular culture. From the coverage it has received in news-
papers and magazines to adaptations, reworkings, and other assorted tips
of the cap in fiction, film, theater, and music, The Great Gatsby has been
a part of the larger cultural conversation in the United States over the
past several decades, notably so in recent years. One of my goals in this
study, then, is to attempt to account for the seemingly perpetual cultural
relevance of a novel that, on its publication, was criticized for being too
tied to its own historical moment to have any real shot at lasting appeal.
The main concern in the pages that follow, though, is to trace the
scholarly reaction to the book through the years — in a sense, to tell a story
about how and why Gatsby came to be considered a classic of American
literature, while also accounting for the changing modes of interpretation
that have affected our understanding of the novel. I look at not only what
the evolution in critical perspectives says about the book itself, but also what
it says about the changing interests, values, and methodologies in Ameri-
can literary criticism. If, as various critics have suggested, The Great Gatsby
serves as a sort of mirror to both the ideals and the anxieties of American
culture, it also might be said to reflect much the same about the critics who
interpret its meaning. While this could be said of most classic literary texts,
Gatsby, with its intricate formal construction and established reputation as a
national classic, has provided a particularly compelling field of play for vari-
ous critical approaches, as I hope to demonstrate.
My interest in the issues explored in this book began about a dozen
years ago, when I presented a conference paper on Gatsby and first met
the members of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, many of whom have
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