Historical Background of The Novel "The Great Gatsby" .pptx

In this Presentation I present about Historical Background of The Novel "The Great Gatsby".

1. Historical Context of the Novel: “The Great Gatsby”

2. Roll No : 05 Enrolment Number : 4069206420220016 Sem : 2 [M.A.] Batch : 2022-2024 Paper Number : 106 Paper Code : 22399 Paper Name : The Twentieth century literature: 1900 to world war-2 S ubmitted To : Smt S.B.Gardi, Department of English, M.K.B.U. Dated On : 11-03-2023 E-Mail : [email protected] HELLO! I AM DRASHTI JOSHI

3. Introduction of Author: Historical context of the novel: Novel In Nutshell: Citation 01 02 03 04 Road Map of Presentation: Thank you

4. Introduction of Author: Full Name: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald Nationality: American Ethnicity: Irish Birth Date: September 24, 1896 Place of Birth: Saint Paul, Minnesota Death Date: December 21, 1940 Place of Death: Hollywood, California Genre(s): Novels, Short Stories, Fiction He became a leading figure in the socially important Triangle Club, a dramatic society, and was elected to one of the leading clubs of the university. He fell in love with Ginevra King, one of the beauties of her generation. Then he lost Ginevra and flunked out of Princeton. With the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him.

5. - Fitzgerald also shares some characteristics with The Great Gatsby’s titular character, Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South. -After The Great Gatsby brought him literary celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless lifestyle of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. (Fitzgerald) - In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. Continue...

6. Novel In Nutshell: -T he Great Gatsby is the most profoundly American novel of its time; at its conclusion, Fitzgerald connects Gatsby’s dream, his “Platonic conception of himself,” with the dream of the discoverers of America.

7. A Historical Background Jazz Age: Roaring Twenties: Flapper Fashion: The Prohibition Act: Great War: Personal Context:

8. Jazz Age -Fitzgerald wrote and set the novel in the 1920s, a time of great change in U.S. society. -Fitzgerald popularized the term “Jazz Age.” It’s used today to define the period during which Fitzgerald lived and wrote about it. -In Fitzgerald’s most popular novel, The Great Gatsby, jazz appears as constant background music. In the contemporary phenomenon of “Gatsby parties”—festivities intended to capture the air of the titular Jay Gatsby’s famously lavish, bacchanalian parties—jazz is de rigueur to evoke the 1920s. - To Fitzgerald's special position in his age. That age was not all "Jazz Age," and in spite of Fitzgerald's having, half-jokingly, invented this name for the twenties, he was himself far from representing merely this element in the period. "He was," as Glenway Wescott put it for his generation, "our darling, our genius, our fool.

9. -F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term "Jazz Age" to describe the decade of decadence and prosperity that America enjoyed in the 1920s, which was also known as the Roaring Twenties. After World War I ended in 1918, the United States and much of the rest of the world experienced an enormous economic expansion. -The surging economy turned the 1920s into a time of easy money, hard drinking (despite the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution), and lavish parties. Though the 1920s were a time of great optimism, Fitzgerald portrays the much bleeker side of the revelry by focusing on its indulgence, hypocrisy, shallow recklessness, and its perilous—even fatal—consequences. Roaring Twenties:

10. Flapper Fashion: Also seen throughout The Great Gatsby is the flapper culture. This period of women’s liberation saw young women with short hair and increased freedoms. Jordan Baker is the best example of this kind of woman. Despite society’s changing nature, the world still hasn’t accepted Jordan as an independent person. She dates multiple men, says and does what she wants, and is well-known as an athlete. These features set her at a stark distance from women in previous generations. For many during this period, she represented what was going wrong with the United States. Fitzgerald’s central characters in The Great Gatsby are never this direct in their judgments of her, but Nick and others do make passing comments about her character

11. The Prohibition Act - Prohibition is another important feature in the novel, one that some scholars put at its heart. During this period, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, alcohol sales were made illegal in the United States. Those who supported the ban cited a decline in morals, religion, and family values as a result of drinking alcohol. Prohibition allowed Jay Gatsby to accumulate his wealth. He and his partners bootlegged alcohol on the black market, selling it illegally and making a great deal of money. -Gatsby was able to rise into the ranks of the uber-wealthy in a way that did not sit well with the “old money” families like the Buchanans. It is this difference that puts West and East Egg slightly at odds. The “old money” side is seen as more sophisticated and desirable than the “new money” side. -While it’s never clearly stated exactly what Gatsby is up to, there are allusions that bootlegging is not the only business he’s in. There is more darkness to Gatsby’s life than even Nick finds out. This is all alluded to with rumors like he “was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.”

12. The Great war:1st world war - The First World War was fought between July 1914 and November 1918. For a few years America refused to take part in the conflict, but in April 1917 the president, Woodrow Wilson, declared that America would join forces with Great Britain, France and their allies against Germany and its allies. Nearly 3 million men were drafted into the American army and many of them were sent to Europe. -In this novel, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby are said to have been amongst those soldiers sent to fight in France. Nick mentions specifically the Battle of the Argonne Forest, an offensive in northern France near the end of the war. -In The Great Gatsby, both Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby himself are veterans of World War I, and it is Gatsby's war service that kicks off his rise from a “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (in the words of his romantic rival, Tom Buchanan) to the fabulously wealthy owner of a mansion on West Egg, Long Island.

13. Personal Context - Often, readers try to draw comparisons between Fitzgerald’s life and the lives of the characters in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, is sometimes compared to Daisy Buchanan. This comparison is strengthened by the fact that the two didn’t marry until Fitzgerald had published his first book, and it proved to be a financial success. -This is similar to how Daisy and Gatsby didn’t marry because the latter lacked the means to give Daisy the life she wanted. This is why she married Tom Buchanan and the loss that inspired Gatsby to strive for the life he achieved. It also led to his downfall and death.

14. Conclusion -Novel The Great Gatsby Set in what was called the Jazz Age (a term popularized by Fitzgerald), or the Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby vividly captures its historical moment: the economic boom of postwar America, the new jazz music, the free-flowing illegal liquor. -As Fitzgerald later remarked in an essay about the era, it was “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”

15. Work cited Baldwin, Emma " The Great Gatsby Historical Context 🍾 " Book Analysis , The Great Gatsby Historical Context | Book Analysis . Accessed 8 March 2023. Fitzgerald, Scott. “The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby Background.” SparkNotes , https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gatsby/context/. Accessed 8 March 2023. "Historical Context: The Great Gatsby." EXPLORING Novels, Gale, 2003. Gale In Context: High School, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ2111500086/SUIC?u=clov94514&sid=bookmark-SUIC&xid=bed5a009. Accessed 8 Mar. 2023. Hope College Students Dressed up as Flappers . The Joint Archives of Holland, JSTOR , https://jstor.org/stable/community.27576334. Accessed 8 Mar. 2023. Mizener, Arthur. "F. Scott Fitzgerald". Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Dec. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/F-Scott-Fitzgerald. Accessed 8 March 2023. Mizener, Arthur. “The F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle , vol. 12, no. 4, 1951, pp. 190–95. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/26402963. Accessed 8 Mar. 2023.