Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture (Contemporary American Literature) - Hardcover

McParland, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1442247088 ISBN 13: 9781442247086

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015

Synopsis

Many of the heralded writers of the 20th century—including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner—first made their mark in the 1920s, while established authors like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis produced some of their most important works during this period. Classic novels such as The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Elmer Gantry, and The Sound and the Fury not only mark prodigious advances in American fiction, they show us the wonder, the struggle, and the promise of the American dream.

In Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture, Robert McParland looks at the key contributions of this fertile period in literature. Rather than provide a compendium of details about major American writers, this book explores the culture that created F. Scott Fitzgerald and his literary contemporaries. The source material ranges from the minutes of reading circles and critical commentary in periodicals to the archives of writers’ works—as well as the diaries, journals, and letters of common readers. This work reveals how the nation’s fiction stimulated conversations of shared images and stories among a growing reading public.

Signifying a cultural shift in the aftermath of World War I, the collective works by these authors represent what many consider to be a golden age of American literature. By examining how these authors influenced the reading habits of a generation, Beyond Gatsby enables readers to gain a deeper comprehension of how literature shapes culture.

About this title

About the Author

Robert McParland is Professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Felician College. He is the editor of Music and Literary Modernism (2009) and Film and Literary Modernism (2013) and the author of Charles Dickens's American Audience (2010), How to Write about Joseph Conrad (2011), and Mark Twain's Audience (2014).

Review

"McParland's impressive depth of cultural knowledge, sharp analytic eye, and narrative prowess result in a study which offers precisely what the very best novels of the 1920s remain capable of-  a vivid sense of place in a chaotic, ever-changing world. In an age of intense specialization, McParland's text serves as a refreshing reminder of how critically transformative a well-written survey can be. His aim, for sure, is a broad one... Today, as debates about the future of the novel rage on, McParland's study is particularly poignant and potentially transformative." - The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Josh Simpson, Vol.4, Is. 1 and 2 (2016):459-462.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1442247088
• ISBN 13: 9781442247086
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 274