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

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 Gatsbycritiques the romantic nationalist ideology of Americas game by revealing the class divisions and tensions of baseballs spectator culture.

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, Meyer Wolfshiem, and Americas Game

Coda: Of Habitus and Homecoming

Notes

Bibliography

Index