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CURNUTT, KIRK, ED. A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. viii + 285 pp. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.
WAGNER-MARTIN, LINDA. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman's Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xv + 251 pp. $24.95.
A noteworthy feature of the best recent academic books on F. Scott Fitzgerald is their accessibility. Resisting the often arcane jargon and the conceptual problems of contemporary literary and cultural theory, Scott's leading scholarly caretakers and commentators have conscientiously aimed their work at the intelligent, curious general reader and the undergraduate student. This is obviously commendable, but we might ask whether the important consideration given such readers also reflects the conservative character and oddly marginal stature of F. Scott Fitzgerald studies within the contemporary academy. On the one hand, it is striking that so many recent American studies projects and revisionist studies of American modernism either neglect or give but passing mention to Fitzgerald-one of the greatest and most influential twentiethcentury American prose artists and a remarkable early instance of the celebrity author. On the other hand, leading Fitzgerald scholars tend to disregard important panoramic books that include serious attention to Fitzgerald's work-such as Walter Benn Michaels' Our America (1995), William Gleason's The Leisure Ethic (1999), or David Leverentz's Paternalism Incorporated (2003). In resisting the pressure to become more theoretically self-conscious and engage some of the problems opened up by innovative critical perspectives on the literary and cultural field within which Fitzgerald worked, Fitzgerald's champions may be largely to blame for giving the impression that the study of his art, let alone his life or his manuscripts, is pretty much exhausted, since much of what they offer repeats and consolidates previous work.
The essays commissioned for A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald only partly unsettle this impression. Welcome news in itself is the appearance of a Fitzgerald volume in this Oxford University Press series. Alongside the Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald published in 2002, it testifies to Fitzgerald's continuing canonical stature. At the same time, however, these volumes reflect the predominant influence of a relatively small cadre of scholars (apart from biographer and bibliographer Matthew Broccoli): five of the seven contributors to the Historical Guide contributed to the Cambridge Companion,...