F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and Damned: New Critical Essays

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned is a transitional work that explores the themes of privilege, decay, and the passage from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age. This collection of essays by prominent scholars offers insights into the novel's major themes and highlights its relevance to modern readers, despite its shortcomings.

Format: Hardback
Length: 306 pages
Publication date: 30 October 2022
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has often been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, serving as a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby. However, The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the bright young things novel, in which privileged and wealthy characters succumb to decay due to their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging.

Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights rather than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

Weight: 634g
Dimension: 162 x 237 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780807177730