Not ‘a Sincere and Yet Radiant World’ but ‘Trashy Imaginings’ – Representations of Popular Culture in Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction

This chapter discusses Fitzgerald’s conflicted relationship with popular culture in the interwar period from 1918 until his death in 1940. Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post were lucrative, and helped Fitzgerald to establish his early flapper ‘brand’, but he was often wary of being identified with these commercial magazines. Fitzgerald carefully uses references to popular culture in order to disrupt our expectations of his lyrical style as well as the established magazine short story conventions of the 1920s and 1930s. By using such experimental techniques whilst also courting a mass audience, Fitzgerald can be seen pursuing literary acclaim as well as financial security: joint aims that he harboured throughout his career. This chapter shows how Fitzgerald uses parody to shed new light on popular cultural forms of the period, as well as to interrogate the concept of leisure in a period in which there was a great upheaval of cultural values. He identifies with black entertainers and African American culture as a means of theorizing his own relationship with the entertainment industry. His use of parody enables him to navigate fluidly between popular and ‘high’ culture, and to undermine commercial magazine formulae, whilst establishing his own brand of literary modernism.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Fiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered primarily as a novelist, but he wrote nearly two hundred short stories for popular magazines such as the widely-read Saturday Evening Post. These stories are vividly infused with the new popular culture of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, from jazz and blues music to motion pictures and performing arts. This book demonstrates how popular culture had a deep impact on Fitzgerald’s work, not just in terms of evoking period detail, but by confirming Fitzgerald as an experimental writer whose popular short stories reflect the serious modernist concerns occupying writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Parker, and Langston Hughes. This book explores how popular culture impacted on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary aesthetics on both thematic and formal levels, to a greater extent than previously recognised. Encompassing spheres of both American studies and cultural studies, this book offers a revisionist perspective on Fitzgerald’s short fiction of the interwar period, which is often overlooked in favour of the novels, especially The Great Gatsby. By exploring Fitzgerald’s fascination with leisure, specifically the intertwined cultural spheres of dance, music, theatre, and film, this book argues that he innovatively imported practices borrowed from other popular cultural media into his short stories, deploying disruptive techniques of ambiguity and parody that sit in tension with reader expectations of his lyrical style and the commercial publication contexts of his stories.

From Battling Adult Authority to Battling the Opposite Sex

Chapter Three examines Marjorie Henderson's Buell's Little Lulu.When the now iconic figure moved from The Saturday Evening Post where she had resided since the 1930s to comic books during the 1950s, her character underwent numerous transformations.One compelling but formerly overlooked change is the nature of Lulu's rebellion.In the single-panel gag comics, the young girl was overwhelmingly targeting adults with her antics.Meanwhile, in the comic books, her sworn enemy is the gang of neighborhood boys. This modification from Little Lulu engaging in intergenerational conflicts during the pre-war era to intragenerational ones during the postwar period forms a compelling and previously unexplored facet to the literary, artistic, and cultural alterations that took place to this character across different print formats.The shift from plots that pitted children against adults in the 1930s to ones that pitted girls against boys in the 1950s reflects larger shifts in American culture regarding the gendering of children and the sexual segregation of childhood.

Accounting for play as work in The Expense Account

Purpose This paper aims to examine how and why finance is represented in cultural products. Focussing on an illustration by Norman Rockwell for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, this analysis suggests that financialization is represented through the technique of visually incongruent humour. Humour relays the cultural value of the separation of work and play, and financialization is a tool to make sense of play as work. Addressing why certain financial representations are produced highlights the influence of finance in determining how and what messages about financialization are made public. This analysis of a single illustration suggests a need for further research into comparative and contextual studies of culture and finance. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a qualitative analysis of The Expense Account (1957), a cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post. Findings In analysing the visually incongruent humour of the illustration, the cultural value of the separation of work and play is muddied by the lack of supervision and undefined organizational space. Freedom of travel and lack of managerial presence suggest that travelling salesmen face anxiety and uncertainty in having to account for their fun activities as work. Accounting is one tool of financialization used to interpret play as work by employees. This illustration was produced in a for-profit context and was therefore influenced by the financial decisions of magazine editors and customers. Practical implications Interdisciplinary qualitative analysis of finance and humorous popular cultural images suggests that accounting is a financial tool for making sense of play as work outside fixed organizational spaces. Additional support is given for studying popular culture and finance together, as popular culture is produced within a financial system in which financial decisions determine humorous representations of financialization. Originality/value This paper adopts a financial perspective in examining a Norman Rockwell illustration and makes the case for examining how representations of financialization are made by humour and financial influence.

Lardner, Ring

Ring Lardner was a sharp-witted American humorist who had an amazing ear for malapropisms, idioms, and the lively vernacular of early 20th-century Chicago and later the East Coast. Originally a sports writer for baseball, Lardner branched out to short stories in 1914, when he wrote serial fiction for the Saturday Evening Post. This job lead to him honing the authorial control that lead to him creating three original and beloved fictional characters. They were the baseball player Jack Keefe (who appeared in the Saturday Evening Post stories); later, an unnamed but sarcastic husband; and years later, Fred Gross, an inept detective. His unique, first-person stories held an air of authenticity and daring. Readers loved his work for the style and subjects that transcended the stodgy halls of refined literature, and yet intellectuals mined them for the brilliant irony and cultural criticism. Lardner developed a reputation as a complex writer whose column, nonetheless, was read weekly by the mainstream, not just the experts. Additionally, critics saw immediate value in how Lardner let himself be fascinated by the social microcosm of baseball (with minor leaguers maneuvering to rise in the ranks); he saw in it a parallel to class struggles in America. When he later became an actual Long Island neighbor of American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, he sought to capture in literature the decadence of the American lifestyle. His later work was fiercely critical of shallow attitudes, social climbing, and the tendency for business interests to undermine culture. By 1929, Lardner's rough lifestyle and utter disenchantment with America—as well as a tuberculosis diagnosis—took a toll on his creative output. He had been a binge drinker since his days as Fitzgerald's socialite neighbor. His drinking was fueled by his deep vein of disgust for his own society. His wildly comedic and witty writing belied his own weaknesses, including succumbing to the stress of being financially responsible for his family. Monetary success eventually came in 1930, when he coauthored a musical, “June Moon.” It was fleeting, however; the next years saw him produce a weekly radio column and rehash the Jack Keefe adventures in a 1933 redux of fictional baseball letters, titled Lose with a Smile. He died that year, of a heart attack, on September 25. He was forty-eight years old.