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Cover image of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction
Cover image of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction

"An Almost Theatrical Innocence"

John T. Irwin

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A personal interpretation of one of America’s most important writers.

"Fitzgerald’s work has always deeply moved me," writes John T. Irwin. "And this is as true now as it was fifty years ago when I first picked up The Great Gatsby. I can still remember the occasions when I first read each of his novels; remember the time, place, and mood of those early readings, as well as the way each work seemed to speak to something going on in my life at that moment. Because the things that interested Fitzgerald were the things that interested me and because there seemed to be so many similarities in our...

A personal interpretation of one of America’s most important writers.

"Fitzgerald’s work has always deeply moved me," writes John T. Irwin. "And this is as true now as it was fifty years ago when I first picked up The Great Gatsby. I can still remember the occasions when I first read each of his novels; remember the time, place, and mood of those early readings, as well as the way each work seemed to speak to something going on in my life at that moment. Because the things that interested Fitzgerald were the things that interested me and because there seemed to be so many similarities in our backgrounds, his work always possessed for me a special, personal authority; it became a form of wisdom, a way of knowing the world, its types, its classes, its individuals."

In his personal tribute to Fitzgerald's novels and short stories, Irwin offers an intricate vision of one of the most important writers in the American canon. The third in Irwin's trilogy of works on American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction resonates back through all of his previous writings, both scholarly and poetic, returning to Fitzgerald's ongoing theme of the twentieth-century American protagonist's conflict between his work and his personal life. This conflict is played out against the typically American imaginative activity of self-creation, an activity that involves a degree of theatrical ability on the protagonist's part as he must first enact the role imagined for himself, which is to say, the self he means to invent.

The work is suffused with elements of both Fitzgerald's and Irwin's biographies, and Irwin's immense erudition is on display throughout. Irwin seamlessly ties together details from Fitzgerald's life with elements from his entire body of work and considers central themes connected to wealth, class, work, love, jazz, acceptance, family, disillusionment, and life as theatrical performance.

Reviews

Reviews

This volume is an example of what happens when an expert takes a career's worth of teaching and study and elegantly applies it to a subject he loves. John Irwin... wastes nary a word in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction considering Fitzgerald's life and what makes his stories so poetically heartbreaking. A must for Fitzgerald fans, and an enthusiastic push for those who've only read Gatsby once to explore the entire oeuvre.

This is a luminous, eye-opening, deeply appreciative study about the writings of Fitzgerald, as opposed to yet another chronicle of his high life and hard times... Indeed, this is precisely the kind of book that's long overdue.

Readers will find that [F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction] offers discerning analysis... deserving attention is Irwin's argument about the influence of music, particularly jazz, on Fitzgerald. Finally, treatment of "the mythical method" is revealing, considering that mythopoetic readers of literature are all but moribund. Remarkably, this book does not rehash previous close readings but incorporates the best of such criticisms.

It is a testament to both the author's brilliance and the scrupulousness of his focus and approach that the book delivers on every conceivable level... Simply stated, now that "An Almost Theatrical Innocence" has arrive, we can agree that it was well worth the wait.

John T. Irwin's F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction is a brave attempt... to give Fitzgerald the kind of resolutely non-fan-magazine scrutiny that Irwin has previously given to Hart Crane and Poe. he says some smart things about Fitzgerald's imagery—about, for instance, how ambiguous the idea of light is in his writing, so that the green light at the end of the dock is a protent of the shining illusory screen of the movies, standing for persistent illusion as much as romantic aspiration.

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Book Details

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Compensating Visions in The Great Gatsby
2. Fitzgerald as a Southern Writer
3. The Importance of "Repose"
4. "An Almost Theatrical Innocence"
5. Fitzgerald and the Mythical Method

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Compensating Visions in The Great Gatsby
2. Fitzgerald as a Southern Writer
3. The Importance of "Repose"
4. "An Almost Theatrical Innocence"
5. Fitzgerald and the Mythical Method
6. On the Son's Own Terms
Works Cited
Index

Author Bio
John T. Irwin
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John T. Irwin

John T. Irwin is the Decker Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where he formerly served as chair of the Writing Seminars. His previous books include The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Prize.