第二十七屆英美文學研討會
27th Annual Conference of the English and American Literature Association
A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent, is a retired Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, 1997-2011. Lee has been instrumental in developing American Studies in the UK and Europe, and has held visiting professorial positions in the US. His impressive list of academic works includes Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004; Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009) and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010). He has also edited a wide range of essay collections and is a prolific poet.
Keynote
A. Robert Lee
American Restlessness in the Jazz Age: Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Whatever else The Great Gatsby has won by way of reputation -- a re-writing of the American Dream, a tale of doomed errantry with its prince and fairy queen, a myth of desire and dust -- it also stands as a period classic of the Jazz Age. Poised within the 1920s of wealth and the paradox of its costs, and against a World War as brutal as any, it captures a society in which according to the novel’s own words “anything can happen…Even Gatsby could happen.” In the voice of Nick Carraway Fitzgerald develops a singular portrait of a society indeed one of restlessness, for the rich as for the working class. Relationships fracture. Cars crash. A “Jazz history of the world” prevails. Alcohol might almost be currency. Flappers and their beaux take to Gatsby’s offer to party without restraint. And death stalks in the form of a gun. This lecture explores these different seams in detail.