Reading the Jazz Age in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Abstract

This research work undertakes a comparative study of two American modernist novels Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Based on the New Historicist theory, this work analyses the social and historical backgrounds of the two novels that belong to two different American ethnic groups, the American and African-American. Moreover, through the lens of New Historicism, we demonstrated how the two novels mirror their authors’ backgrounds which is the Jazz Age. Furthermore, we compared the two novels using an important tenet of the New Historicist theory which is self-fashioning, and attempted to explore some fashioning aspects of the Jazz Age that are represented within the two novels. Finally, we explored the theme of racism that has always been an important quandary in American society and literature.