scholarly journals On Booze: a representation of The Roaring Twenties in the great Gatsby

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-164
Author(s):  
Jenison Alisson dos Santos ◽  
Caio Antônio de Medeiros Nóbrega Nunes Gomes ◽  
Elisa Mariana de Medeiros Nóbrega
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Great Gatsby ◽  
American Author ◽  
Post War

Fitzgerald is considered by many to be the spokesperson of the 1920’s post-World War I, offering his readers a distinctive look into the Golden Age of the U.S.A.. This article focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The great Gatsby (2001) and its representation and criticism of the historical context in which author and novel are inserted: the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties of the United States of America. For this purpose, our critical framework is based on Bloom’s (2006) and Heise’s (2001) studies on the subject, targeting a pertinent dialogue with Fitzgerald’ s work. As a result of our articulation between the critical framework and the corpus, we were able to recognize how the American author managed to express in his work a keen perception of the social conventions and the morals of the Jazz Age, of both the overt (the parties and the ostentation) and the covert aspects (the emptiness of that society and the unspoken post-war dread) of his time.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackson R. Bryer
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
World War I ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
The Great Gatsby

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (b. 1896–d. 1940), named after his distant relative, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at private schools there and in the East. He attended Princeton University, dropping out to join the army after the United States entered World War I. While in the service, he began his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which he revised twice before its publication in 1920. It is a highly autobiographical account of its author’s teenage and college years; its frank descriptions of adolescent behavior and its unique literary form brought Fitzgerald literary success and made him and his glamorous young wife, Zelda, celebrities as the prototypical couple of the 1920s and its Jazz Age culture. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), which, again partially autobiographically, follows the lives of a young couple through the tumultuous early years of their marriage, was not nearly as successful with the critics and the public as his first had been, but after a failed attempt at writing a play, The Vegetable (1923), he produced in The Great Gatsby (1925) the intricately patterned, poetic, and concise novel that is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and one of the greatest American works of fiction. Thereafter, he struggled to complete his fourth novel, continuing to write short stories to offset his constant money problems, which were increased in the early 1930s by his wife’s mental illness. When Tender Is the Night appeared in 1934, its focus on wealthy young Americans on the Riviera was not received well by an America struggling through the Great Depression, but increasingly it has come to be regarded as, if not equal to The Great Gatsby, certainly a major literary work. Similarly, some of Fitzgerald’s short stories, which he tended to dismiss as potboilers written to support his often-extravagant lifestyle, are now thought to be among the best of that genre. Fitzgerald is admired for the skill and accuracy with which he depicted his era, for the beauty and artistry of his style, and for what his first biographer, Arthur Mizener, described in the introduction to Afternoon of an Author (Fitzgerald 1958, cited under Selected Works: Reprinted Material) as “the curious way in which he combined the innocence of complete involvement with an almost scientific coolness of observation” (p. 3).

The Disillusionment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dreams and Ideals in The Great Gatsby

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 1295
Author(s):  
Fahimeh Keshmiri
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
The Great Gatsby ◽  
Social Novel ◽  
American Economy

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the American economy ascended, bringing unprecedented levels of affluence to the nation. The chaos of World War I left America in a state of distress, and the generation that fought the war turned to profligate living to recompense. In this novel, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. In this era, unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, which ends to the collapse of all characters and society. This novel represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Here we analyze major characters, symbols, themes and plot of this masterpiece as a tragedy, and a social novel. This creative work has been identified as one of the greatest novels of all time with Fitzgerald's incredible use of realism and symbolism. Moreover; there are some elements that make this work a modernistic and existential one. These key elements that made this work a success are obvious in the development of characters, plot, themes and setting throughout the novel. It is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole.

scholarly journals ’Det er easy at tale engelsk også’. Amerikadansk i 1960’erne og 1970’erne

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (47) ◽  
pp. 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karoline Kühl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
World War ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Post War ◽  
American Society

The conditions for the Danish language among Danish emigrants and their descendants in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were tough: The group of Danish speakers was relatively small, the Danes did not settle together as other immigrant groups did, and demographic circumstances led many young, unmarried Danish men to marry non-Danish speaking partners. These were all factors that prevented the formation of tight-knit Danish-speaking communities. Furthermore, US nationalistic propaganda in the wake of World War I and the melting-pot effect of post-war American society in the 1950s contributed to a rapid decline in the use of Danish among the emigrants. Analyses of recordings of 58 Danish-American speakers from the 1970s show, however, that the language did not decline in an unsystematic process of language loss, only to be replaced quickly and effectively by English. On the contrary, the recordings show contactinduced linguistic innovations in the Danish of the interviewees, which involve the creation of specific lexical and syntactical American Danish features that systematically differ from Continental Danish. The article describes and discusses these features, and gives a thorough account of the socioeconomic and linguistic conditions for this speaker group.

scholarly journals Raising European citizens: Constructing European identities in French and English textbooks

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 444-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inari Sakki
Keyword(s):  
European Integration ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
The United States ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
English School ◽  
The Social ◽  
French And English ◽  
English Textbooks ◽  
Post War

Schools play a pivotal role in the formation of identities and in the political socialization of youth. This study explores the social representations of European integration in French and English school textbooks and shows how the social representations are discursively used to construct national and European identities. By analysing the history and civics textbooks of major educational publishers, this study aims to demonstrate how European integration is understood, made familiar and concretized in the school textbooks of the two influential but different European countries. The findings suggest some shared and some diverse patterns in the way the two European countries portray and construct the political project of European integration. These representations, constructed around French Europe in French textbooks and ambivalent Europe in English textbooks, share the images of a strong European economy and a French-led political Europe. However, they position themselves differently with respect to the United States, motivation for the European unification process and the significance of common values and heritage. In both countries textbooks draw upon memories that are important for group identity. While the French textbooks make European integration meaningful in reference to a shared post-war collective memory and to a cultural memory based on a more ancient idea of Europe, shared values and heritage, the English textbooks anchor it more strongly to domestic policy.

Charles Wolfe, “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna”

Heart Beats ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Robson
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
John Moore

This chapter resurrects “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Charles Wolfe's poem, a reimagining of the hasty interment of a fallen general after one of the land battles in the Napoleonic wars, was repeatedly quoted by soldiers and other individuals during the American Civil War when they found themselves having to organize, or witness, the burials of dead comrades. In recent years, cultural historians of Great Britain have tried to account for the massive shift in burial and memorial practices for the common soldier that occurred between 1815 and 1915. The chapter argues that the presence of Wolfe's poem in the hearts and minds of ordinary people played its part in creating the social expectations that led to the establishment of the National Cemeteries in the United States, and thus, in due course, the mass memorialization of World War I.

Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

Resignation at the Treasury: the Social Services Committee and the Failure to Reform the Welfare State, 1955–57

1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Constructive Development ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
The Welfare State ◽  
Welfare Expenditure

ABSTRACTBetween 1955–7 welfare expenditure in Britain came under serious attack. The main protagonist was the Treasury and its chosen implement a five-year review of the social services, to be presided over by a ministerial Social Services Committee. The attack rebounded, for the Committee provided the opportunity for the consolidation of the defence of welfare expenditure and for a frontal attack on Treasury assumptions. This neglected episode in Conservative government social policy places in historical context the early defeat of monetarism (with Thorneycroft's resignation in 1958) and provides the background to the establishment of the Plowden Committee and of the Public Expenditure Survey Committee. It also raises questions about the degree of post-war consensus and the failure to make the constructive development of the welfare state an objective of ‘conviction’ politics.

Fired by the Ideal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcella Bencivenni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter details the social, political and historical context out of which Italian anarchism emerged in New York City. Embracing a transnational approach, she charts the movement's early roots, its main leaders, geopolitical spaces and distinctive subculture starting from the late nineteenth century when the great Italian immigration to the United States began through the 1920s when the movement started to decline under the blows of governmental repression and postwar nativist calls for 100 percent Americanism.

The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898–1936

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Rossinow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Social Order

AbstractA vigorous Protestant left existed throughout the first half of the twentieth-century in the United States. That Protestant left was the left wing of the social gospel movement, which many historians restrict to the pre-1920 period and whose radical content is often underestimated. This article examines the career of one representative figure from this Protestant left, the Reverend Harry F. Ward, as a means of describing the evolving nature and limits of social gospel radicalism during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Ward, the main author of the 1908 Social Creed of the Churches, a longtime professor at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, and a dogged activist on behalf of labor and political prisoners through his leadership of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, sought a new social order from the early years of the century through the Great Depression of the 1930s. This new order would be the Kingdom of God on earth, and, in Ward's view, it would transcend the competitive and exploitative capitalism that dominated American society in his time. Before World War I, Ward worked to bring together labor activists and church people, and, after the war, he shifted his work toward less expressly religious efforts, while continuing to mentor clerical protégés through his teaching. Ward's leftward trajectory and ever-stronger Communist associations would eventually bring about his political downfall, but, in the mid- 1930s, he remained a respected figure, if one more radical than most, among American Protestant clergy. Organic links tied him and his politics to the broader terrain of social gospel reform, despite the politically driven historical amnesia that later would all but erase Ward from historical memory.

FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR: THE WARTIME ALLIANCE AND POST-WAR TRANSITIONS, 1941–1947

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID REYNOLDS
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

This review examines some of the recent British, American, and Russian scholarship on a series of important international transitions that occurred in the years around 1945. One is the shift of global leadership from Great Britain to the United States, in which, it is argued, the decisive moment was the fall of France in 1940. Another transition is the emergence of a wartime alliance between Britain and America, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, followed by its disintegration into the Cold War. Here the opening of Soviet sources during the 1990s has provided new evidence, though not clear answers. To understand both of these transitions, however, it is necessary to move beyond diplomacy and strategy to look at the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the Second World War. In particular, recent studies of American and Soviet soldiers during and after the conflict re-open the debate about Cold War ideology from the bottom up.

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