This dissertation examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories as they were first published in magazines, sharing page space with illustrations and advertisements. The presence and interplay of media types and paratexts in the magazine stories may significantly impact the reading experience, creating different interpretative possibilities. In this study, an intermedial framework is used to examine select magazine stories. This framework, which also takes inspiration from periodical and multimodal studies, considers the illustrations, advertisements, and short stories as media types with specific characteristics. The intermedial analyses focus on three stories published at different stages of the most active period in Fitzgerald’s writing career. The earliest story, “Winter Dreams” (1922) was published in the two magazines MacLean’s and Metropolitan, “Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman” (1924) appeared in Hearst’s International, and “Family in the Wind” (1932) was published in the Saturday Evening Post. Each case study foregrounds a central theme—nostalgia, gender, and nature, respectively—chosen for its prominence in Fitzgerald’s work, its cultural significance during the Jazz Age, and its continued relevance today. Across all three chapters, the dissertation examines media combination, showing how interactions between literary text and illustration consistently nuance or alter thematic emphases found in the text alone. Transmediation, or how the narrative of one media type is transformed by another, becomes particularly important in discussions about the illustrators’ selection and visual development of narrative scenes, and media representation informs analyses of how references to other media types such as film and news function within the stories. The case study in Chapter 1 focuses on how the illustrations and advertisements in the two magazines interact with nostalgic aspects of the literary text of “Winter Dreams,” the illustrations and the ads magnifying youth and youthful romantic experiences. The case study in Chapter 2 examines how Fitzgerald takes inspiration from the dime novel to bring to the fore various character types that interrogate gender identity, but how the illustrations in the magazine, in contrast, present a rather conservative construction of gender. The case study in Chapter 3 highlights how Fitzgerald is stylistically influenced by the media types of film and news in “Family in the Wind.” The sense of urgency and veracity around the tornado that impacts the town in the story, contrasts to how the magazine layout emphasizes illustrations that focus on human drama. The dissertation contributes to Fitzgerald studies by foregrounding original publication contexts, to literary studies through close readings of lesser-studied works, to intermedial studies via the extensive application of an intermedial framework on the magazine stories, and to periodical studies by demonstrating the value of integrating intermedial and periodical methodologies.
Lara Rodríguez Sieweke (Thu,) studied this question.