Baillie, Justine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0056-9155 (2025) Fitzgerald, modernism, and race. In: Rattray, Laura and Wagner-Martin, Linda, (eds.) Bloomsbury Handbook to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bloomsbury Handbooks . Bloomsbury Academic, London; New York, pp. 15-27. ISBN 978-1350429642; 1350429635-10 (In Press)

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Abstract

In her essay, “Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes,” Toni Morrison situates Stein as a precursor to Euro American modernism in her deployment of an “Africanist” other. In the “Melanctha” section of Three Lives (1909), Stein makes therapeutic use of race in a fictionalisation of her own unhappy love affair that employs the mask of blackness by which to negotiate emotion and experiment with form through appropriation of African American vernacular. Morrison emphasises how the characteristics of modernism are dependent on racial categories for modernism’s delineations of power, gender and identity. Taking Morrison’s analysis of the uses of race and “Africanism” in the development of American writing as a starting point, I then consider the relation between race and the Euro-American modernist aesthetic and its links with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing. Stein’s experiment with African American voice and character is integral to her modernism. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer of what he himself termed “The Jazz Age,” engages with modernist musical traditions and deploys the “Africanist” other but, importantly, also problematises whiteness. Here then, my aim is to explore the role race plays as Fitzgerald, as Morrison noted in “The Foreigner’s’ Home,” “heroically struggled to delineate the ground of belonging and exile, to tirelessly probe its moral cues”. The chapter includes discussion of both Toni Morrison’s and Ralph Ellison’s reflections on jazz and how, as indicative of the African American presence and as an expression of the modernist experience, jazz music functions metaphorically as being reflective of chaos in Fitzgerald’s literary imaginings of American life.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Ralph Ellison; Toni Morrison; Jazz; “Africanism”; American identity; passing; modernist technologies
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PS American literature
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS)
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	20 Sep 2024 12:26
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/48034

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