Sports, Narrative, and Nation in the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald [Paperback]

This study examines the ways that F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed organized spectator sports as working to help structure ideologies of class, community, and nationhood. Situating the study in the landscape of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century American sport culture, Chapter One shows how narratives of attending ballgames, reading or listening to sports media, and being a fan, cultivate communities of spectatorship.

Adopting this same framework, the next three chapters explore how Fitzgeralds literary representations of sport culture express the complexities of American society. Chapter Two specifically considers the intense and dramatic spectacle of college football in This Side of Paradise as a means of exploring links between spectatorship, emulation and ideology. Chapter Three continues with college football as its theme, but this time looks at how it is portrayed in Fitzgeralds short stories, in order to scrutinize the relationship between the performative aspects of sport and the performative aspects of social class. Finally, Chapter Four scrutinizes how The Great Gatsby critiques the romantic nationalist ideology of Americas game by revealing the class divisions and tensions of baseballs spectator culture.

Examining the ways F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed spectator sports as working to help structure ideologies of class, community and nationhood, this book shows how narratives of attending sports and being a fan cultivate communities of spectatorship

Introduction: Fitzgerald, Sport, and Social Interaction Chapter One: We Are a Very Special Country: The Narrativization of Sport and the Fiction of a Classless Nation Chapter Two: Gridiron Paradise: Princetonian Football, American Class Chapter Three: Idol of the Whole Body of Young Men: Football, Heroes, and the Performance of Social Status Chapter Four: Perfunctory Patriotism: Tom Buchanan, lã*