| The thesis provides multidisciplinary literary analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) in light of the writings of social theorist Thorstein Veblen. William Dean Howells, in a book review of Veblen's best known work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), suggested this text of social speculation presented an opportunity for American fiction, and that from the material in Veblen's text, the great American novel could be crafted. Whether under Veblenian influence or spontaneously, Fitzgerald seems to have written the novel Howells suggested: conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, conspicuous waste, pecuniary emulation, and invidious distinction---all concerns of Veblen in his sociological treatment of what he calls the "leisure class" or "kept classes"---are evident in and essential to The Great Gatsby. Other broader-based concerns, including technology and the socially constructed roles of gender and class, appear in Fitzgerald's novel as thematic elements while Veblen treats these issues from a socioanthropological view in various other texts of his own. The thesis notes such coordinations as well, suggesting that elements of structure and unease, still characteristic of American life, were clearly charted early in the twentieth century, or what is now being called "The American Century."... |
