The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald

Deborah Pike

316 pages

Published: June 2017

22 illus.

ISBN: 9780826273697

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Price: $49.00

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About This Book: This book gives light to the multiple artistic expressions of Great Gatsby-writer’s wife as modernist vanguard.

Known as an icon of the Jazz Age, a flamboyant socialite, and the mad wife of F. Scott, Zelda Fitzgerald has inspired studies of her life and work which focus on her earlier years, and on the myth of the glorious-but-doomed woman. As an unprecedented study of the totality Zelda Fitzgerald’s creative work, this book makes an important contribution to the history of women’s art with new perspectives on women and modernity, plagiarism, creative partnership, and the nature of mental illness.

Zelda Fitzgerald’s creative output was astonishing, considering the conditions under which she lived, and the brevity of her life: she wrote dozens of short stories, several journalistic pieces, a play, two novels, hundreds of letters, kept diaries and produced hundreds of artworks. Employing a new mode of literary analysis that draws upon critics, theorists, and historians to situate her work in its context, The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald rehabilitates the literary and artistic status of Zelda Fitzgerald by reassessing her life and writings in the light of archival sources. Such materials include medical and psychiatric documents; her unpublished novel; an artistic and spiritual diary; and over one hundred letters written from asylums.

While much of her writing can be read as a tactical response to her husband’s injunctions against her creativity, it can also be read as brilliant work in its own right. Far from imitating Scott’s style, Zelda Fitzgerald’s artistic output is vibrantly alive and utterly her own.
Authors and Editors: Deborah Pike is a senior lecturer and discipline director of English Literature at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus. She lectured in English language and literature at the University of Paris VII and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, while also employed as editor at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. She has presented papers and seminars in Australia, Europe, the US and the UK. Dr. Pike has published in the areas of cultural studies, postcolonial, and modernist literatures, in addition to a growing interest in wellbeing studies. She is co-editor of On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Playfrom Birth to Beyond.
Praise For This Book: “Challenging, full of energy and interesting, original ideas. Pike’s contention that Zelda Fitzgerald is a Modernist writer who makes a significant contribution to Modernist writing by women is supported by a great deal of well-researched, convincing, and illuminating evidence.”—Sally Cline, author of Zelda Fitzgerald: The Tragic Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age’s High Priestess

“An impressive, wide-ranging work. It does not simply use biography: it bases its readings and conclusions on a thorough knowledge of all Zelda’s work—painting, dance, nonfiction, and fiction—as well as all the personal controversies, and (probably most important) all the dense—and often ignored—unpublished materials in the Princeton archive.”—Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life

“Pike capably handles the wide variety of Zelda Fitzgerald’s work: letters, stories, a novel, unpublished work, a diary, and paintings. Indeed, Pike demonstrates a wide range of reading, not just about Zelda Fitzgerald but also F.Scott Fitzgerald, critical and psychoanalytic theory as well as comparable surrealist novels and other works.”—Jennifer Haytock, SUNY College at Brockport, author of The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women’s Novels of the 1930s

“Moving with admirable ease across a range of critical frameworks, Deborah Pike provides the first sustained—and long overdue—examination of Zelda Fitzgerald’s published and unpublished work: novels, short stories, a play, articles, diaries, and letters. In approaching Fitzgerald as a serious artist in her own right, and situating her writings in the nascent consumer culture from which they emerged, Pike makes a compelling case for a reconsideration of Fitzgerald in the annals of American literary history, especially modernism.”—Sarah Gleeson-White, University of Sydney, author of Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers

“Pike’s contribution to the field is substantial and ambitious. ... it has provided new avenues to think about Fitzgerald—to read simultaneously the lines of privilege and marginalization that cross her life and work, to think about the political continuities across her oeuvre, to analyze discursive categories like seriousness, and to continue to make space for Fitzgerald’s writing in our cultural and critical memory.”—Modernism/Modernity