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In this thesis, the writer is going to give an interpretation about the love tragedy in The Great Gatsby. The writer will pide this thesis into 6 parts. The first part is the introduction part. In this part, there is a brief introduction to the author and the book; also the writer will give a short narration on the main stories in this book. In the second part, it will be the literature review part. In this part, the writer will show the readers about previous studies on this book. The third part will be the love tragedy in The Great Gatsby. The writer will pide this into two sections, including his performance in pursuit of love and the disillusionment of love. In the fifth part, the thesis will give an interpretation on the love, money and moral. The sixth part is the conclusion part. The paper aims at making people understand this novel more deeply and contributing to build healthy values in today’s society.
2. Literature Review
Soon after The Great Gatsby was published, it was greatly praised not only for high achievements but also for its graceful and delicate prose style. T. S. Eliot concluded that it was “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James” (Chang Yaoxin, 2008:56). There was also criticism from some critics like Malcolm Cowley, Dennis Hardy, John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, they sensed a new substance in Fitzgerald’s work.
There was some disapproval apparently. For example, H. L. Mencken attacked the novel and its chief character Gatsby for being too vague to be a disembodied shadow of a literary protagonist. There were also many critical reviews on both his wild lift of “self-indulgence” and his wasting of his talent on commercial writings. In 1939, Arthur Poupord said The Great Gatsby was dropped from the Modern Library because it failed to sell (Poupard and James, 1984:143).
However, after Fitzgerald’s death, Edmund Wilson’s book The Crack Up was published in 1945, it aroused people’s interest in Fitzgerald both as an inpidual and as a literary artist. Lionel Trilling reissued The Great Gatsby with a laudatory introduction, and soon some full-length studies together with critical anthologies came out. Fitzgerald’s reputation as an artist was gradually established and The Great Gatsby was regarded as his finest work of all, the novel also earned him a permanent position in American literature for its cultural relevance and artistic craftsmanship.源'自:751`!论~文'网www.751com.cn
Most criticisms on The Great Gatsby belong to the sphere of traditional criticism．Traditional criticism sees the literary text as sufficient object of knowledge，a container of message．People read literary works to know history and the world around them for the chief function of literary works is to inform the public．Traditional criticism is often labeled as “extrinsic” critical approaches because it concerns itself with such matters as authorial intention，historical，moral or political consideration. The Great Gatsby is also the target of other kinds of criticisms．For example，Marxist Criticism starts from the assumption that literature such as The Great Gatsby must be understood in relation to historical and social reality as interpreted from a Marxist standpoint；Psychoanalytic criticism tends to concentrate on the relation between a literary text and the psychology of its creator；Reception Theory discusses the relation between the original reception of a literary text and how it is perceived at different stages in history up until the present．Reader-response Criticism claims that the meaning of a literary text cannot be seen as separate from the reader’s experience of it．And all texts create “gaps” or “blanks” which reader must use his or her imagination to fill。It is in this interaction between and reader that aesthetic response is created；Cultural Materialism and New historicism are forms of historicist criticism which are interested in literature within its socio-economic context．