Enchanted Places: The Use of Setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction

Most of Fitzgerald's novels and stories start as a romance of love or a fantasy of extravagant glamour, but as the settings and the interplay between characters and the places they live are carefully examined, an emblem-like quality is discovered in their deceptively simple configuration. The first full-length study of Fitzgerald's unparalleled representation of Jazz Age America, this book analyzes an essential, but relatively uncultivated part of the artistry in Fitzgerald's fiction: his use of domestic and urban settings. Fitzgerald's use of these settings as a rich source of imagery objectifies social trends and individual desires. Each setting is no longer just a locale, or a site for a story's action, but a sophisticated device, an integral part of the story designed to convey a unique vision of life in a profound way. Such parabolic quality, the author argues, gives Fitzgerald's fiction enormous possibilities of temporal span and multiple situations, as well as a microcosmic capacity for containing the complexities of reality.