Critical Insights: The Great Gatsby

This volume of criticism begins with essays that provide the reader with cultural, historical, comparative, and critical contexts for understanding Gatsby. Several essays consider the cultural and historical contexts of Fitzgerald’s work while critical comparisons link the novel to the poetry of Keats and the novels Daisy Miller and Passing. The section of contextual readings is followed by a selection of critical overviews, including a consideration of Gatsby as a type of culmination of Fitzgerald’s writings and a comprehensive introduction to the Oxford World Classic edition of Gatsby. The critical overviews are followed by a series of critical readings that focus on narrative style, color symbolism, and character analysis among other topics.