In his general plan for Tender Is The Night, Fitzgerald delineates Dick Diver as "a natural idealist, a spoiled priets, givin in for various causes to the idea of the haute bourgeoise [sic] and ih his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism, his talent and turning to drink and dissipation."1 The rise and fall of Dick Diver is the central concern of Tender Is The Night, and an analysis of the novel reveals that Fitzgerald meticulously arranged the details of Diver's intricate destiny. Many readers of the novel, however, were unable to understand the reasons for Dick's ruin, and there was much negative criticism of Dick's characterization shortly after the novel was published.2

F. Scott Fitzgerald is valued for his contribution to literary arts, culture and his discussion of the American Dream. I argue that his discussion of the American Dream was a lens through which he gave readers access to political insights and an education about political philosophy, American politics, virtue, and reasoning. The American Dream, at its greatest, for Fitzgerald is a nation building myth but at its lowest is a dull materialistic construct. Throughout his works Fitzgerald connects philosophic ideas to the American Dream in attempts to educate and ennoble his readers. The ability to judge well is a critical piece of self-government that was a focus of Fitzgerald's throughout his body of work. In The Beautiful and Damned, by giving weight to Platonic ideals of beauty and goodness, and Platonic heuristics like the allegory of the cave he attempted to negate the detrimental effects of nihilism in America at his time and after. In The Great Gatsby, by presenting virtue of the contemplative life that could be cultivated by his readers, in his time, and including esoteric teachings on those virtues and values he attempted to negate the detrimental effects of materialism on the American dream. Finally, in The Last Tycoon, by articulating an American alternative to the philosopher-king he put forward a vision of statesmanship that could mitigate the effects of materialism and keep the American Dream alive against a socialist attack.

This study of thirty representative short stories from 1912-1941 demonstrates the stages of growth in Fitzgerald's writing which emerged from his own mental development, focusing upon his changing attitudes toward women as he reflects these attitudes in his depictions of the dominant female figures in the stories. The above chronology is then divided into four major blocks; in each block the dominant female illustrates Fitzgerald's concept of women at that particular stage of his life, The stories prove to be integral to the whole of Fitzgerald's writing and deserve to be judged independently of the novels. Furthermore, through an examination of Fitzgerald's short stories, the growth periods and the natural course of his changing attitudes become all the more clear and incisive.

The thesis focuses on modern translations of the classic American novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald within the Czech cultural setting. Initially, in accordance with Gideon Toury's (2012) descriptive model, two Czech translations will be compared in light of their functionality within the target literary canon, their dominating stylistic features will be determined and they will be assessed in terms of their acceptability or adequacy. Subsequently selected excerpts will be compared with the source text to reveal how each of the translations treats Fitzgerald's text, and in relation to these findings their shifts between acceptability and adequacy will be specified. The central goal of the thesis is to evaluate the transfer of Fitzgerald's very specific writing style, with special focus on its poetic character, lyricism and imagery. Therefore individual translation strategies will be identified and the invariant core of both of the translations will be determined. For an even more detailed explanation of the translation strategies the thesis employs the preceding translation by Lubomír Dorůžka (1960) which helps clarify the relationship between the studied translations. In conclusion all of the findings are summarized and characteristics of each of the Czech versions of Fitzgerald's The...

This MA thesis seeks to apply Henri Bergson’s theory of time to a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and David Fincher’s film adaptation of the text, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. By applying Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity, timeless moments will be seen to emerge in the text and the film. I place Fitzgerald’s text in context with other seminal modernist works in order to provide a study of the importance of the story within its time period. Through Deleuze’s application of Bergson to cinema, I analyze the evolution of the time-image within Fincher’s film, and place it within the context of a cinema of time. Ultimately, this thesis begins a discussion of the importance of how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Fincher’s works contribute meditations on time in their respective time periods and media.

This essay investigates the status of alcohol consumption in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925). The analysis focuses on character study reading of Jay Gatsby, and Tom and Daisy Buchanan in conjunction with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, by placing habitus in the specific historical context of the novel. The analysis focuses on the social structures of the alcohol-consuming upper-class Americans, and the reproduction of internalized practices during Prohibition. Drinking alcohol is seen as a valued, cultural capital among the elite society and used as a tool in a competition of power. The Buchanans, as true members of their class, are constantly intoxicated. For Gatsby, a sober man and an imposter of the elite society, drinking has no cultural value. I argue that, from the cultural aspect, Gatsby’s fall is a consequence of his soberness among the drunkenness of the hierarchy.

This thesis examines the treatment of Native American and Jewish American characters in four of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories: “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920), “The Passionate Eskimo” (1935), “May Day” (1930), and “The Hotel Child” (1931). Little critical attention has been given to these stories even though they illustrate Fitzgerald’s awareness of the negative ramifications of culturally destructive views and an exploration of new culturally pluralistic ideas. In these stories, Fitzgerald undermines common ethnic stereotypes and demonstrates tension between the intolerance of the American public and the fear of immigrant influence. Fitzgerald is able to re-image the representation of members of these groups and show the evolution of his views on ethnicity and culture. In conclusion, this thesis argues that these stories reveal Fitzgerald’s interest in supporting some level of cultural pluralism and his need to tolerate, if not accept, the differences in the beliefs and cultures in America.

The financial crisis of 2008 has been the most significant global economic phenomenon of the new century. Sudden and largely unanticipated, this crisis nonetheless marks the latest in a series of financial panics that forms a welldocumented feature of finance capitalism stretching back to the Dutch Tulip Bubble of 1637 and beyond, including such notorious crises as the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the Railway Shares panics of 1837 and 1847, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and Black Monday in 1987. These and other crises have fostered a complex and diverse intellectual response - particularly since the South Sea Bubble - that has included interventions not only from economists and economic historians, but poets, dramatists, novelists, and others. This raises the question of whether the novel’s contribution to our wider understanding of financial crises has been fully acknowledged and assessed. In this thesis, the complex and shifting relationship between literary and non-literary responses to financial crisis is explored through an examination of the ideas of political economists, philosophers, journalists, financiers, and others, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Lord Overstone, Walter Bagehot, Herbert Spencer, Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and J.M. Keynes, that situates their theories alongside readings of novels of financial crisis from the 1850s onward.

This thesis examines Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s writing published between 1920 and 1932. To date, biographers and scholars have largely failed to carefully examine and understand Zelda’s publications. During this period Zelda critiques the materialism and generational lack of respect she finds in the North in her articles, while using her imagination to discuss the possibilities of the South in her short stories. All of her works during these years culminate in her novel, Save Me the Waltz, in which much of her life and return to the South is mirrored by her heroine, Alabama Knight. This thesis examines Zelda’s publications in this 1920 to 1932 period in order to reveal her perception of the society she had become a part of when she married F. Scott Fitzgerald and to understand the transition in her desire to at first fit in to the Northern society that expected her to be the flapper and celebrity wife, and then later to find success and self-expression in a return to the South.

Abstract This thesis attempts to contribute to both intermedial studies and F. Scott Fitzgerald scholarship by studying the text-illustration interplay in two versions of “The Rich Boy”. Intermediality, which pays close attention to media interactions, is a natural method to explore the word-image relations in these texts: the first version, published in Red Book Magazine in 1926, and an illustrated Spanish translation from 2012.             Lars Elleström’s definition of media as a combination of modes and modalities, plays a central role in the analysis, where I study how these interact in each text: For instance, in terms of the material and sensorial modalities, both illustrators try to simulate depth and convey the senses in a flat interface. In terms of the spatiotemporal modality, the anachronies in the time placement of Gruger’s images intensify the nostalgic mood in the text, while Ágreda’s adherence to the text’s time relays a certain autonomy. Both their treatments of space are often symbolic; thus, regarding the semiotic modality, the images are symbolic besides iconic. Each text is colored by the reading of the illustrator, who is also a reader and interpreter.             The theoretical framework also comprises of an approach to nostalgia: While Fitzgerald’s story is nostalgic per se, the illustrators display variations of nostalgia: Gruger’s work mirrors and enhances the nostalgic mood of the text, and while to a certain extent, Ágreda’s also does this, his nostalgia is most manifest in how he attempts to recreate a particular picture of the Jazz Age.