{"product_id":"9780817387976","title":"Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities","description":"In this fascinating study, Chris Messenger posits F. Scott Fitzgerald as a great master of sentiment in modern American fiction. Sentimental forms both attracted and repelled Fitzgerald while defining his deepest impulses as a prose writer. Messenger demonstrates that the sentimental identities, refractions, and influences Fitzgerald explores in \u003ci\u003eTender Is the Night\u003c\/i\u003e define key components in his affective life, which evolved into a powerful aesthetic that informed his vocation as a modernist writer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003e“ Tender Is the Night” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’ s Sentimental Identities\u003c\/i\u003e, Messenger traces the roots of Fitzgerald’ s writing career to the deaths of his two infant sisters a few months before his own birth. It was their loss, Fitzgerald wrote, that made him a writer. Messenger highlights how the loss of Fitzgerald’ s siblings powerfully molded his relation to maternal nurturing and sympathy in \u003ci\u003eTender Is the Night\u003c\/i\u003e as well as how it shaped the homosocial intimations of its care-giving protagonist, psychiatrist Dick Diver. A concomitant grief and mourning was fueled by Fitzgerald’ s intimate and intense creative rivalry with his often-institutionalized wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile sentiment is a discredited strain in high modernism, Fitzgerald nevertheless embraced it in \u003ci\u003eTender Is the Night\u003c\/i\u003e to fashion this most poignant and beautiful successor to \u003ci\u003eThe Great Gatsby\u003c\/i\u003e. Fitzgerald’ s aesthetic and emotional preoccupations came most vividly to life in this major novel. Messenger describes how Fitzgerald, creating his character Nicole Warren Diver as a victim of paternal incest, finally found the sentimental key to finishing his novel and uniting his vision of the two narratives of “ saving” the two sisters and reimagining the agony of his wife and their marriage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFitzgerald’ s productive quarrel with and through sentiment defines his career, and Messenger convincingly argues that \u003ci\u003eTender Is the Night\u003c\/i\u003e should be placed alongside \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eGreat Gatsby\u003c\/i\u003e as a classic exemplar of the modern novel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Alabama Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47128701567216,"sku":"9780817387976","price":59.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780817387976_p0.jpg?v=1763749195","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780817387976","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}